#- she's around to protect the computer systems for the company that made her. her wires and generallized makeup is.. huge.. egehehehe

[hardwiredd]

smth smth computer maintenance gone wrong or something

[shantalangel]

Stories written on the wall of one of the rooms in the game Armikrog.

It’s about everything happened before the game, P’s parents life, how they met and how she appeared.

Reading sequence:

The Blank Miner. Part 1

The Blank Miner. Part 2

Tools, Weapons, Food, Plants, Medicine, Magic and Pets

A Meeting in the Woods

Punishment and Crime. Part 1

Punishment and Crime. Part 2

Punishment and Crime. Part 3

Desperation

Desperation

No water for four days. Could be five.

Everything is empty. There is no food on this craft.

P does not seem to mind. She remains healthy, but seems sad at the sight of Meva and I starving. No more giggling. No more crystals.

For awhile, we could make her laugh, and she would provide the P-tonium to power the ship.

We are too weak.

The ship is moving but we don't know where it is going. If I take the last crystal out of the grid, the ship will stop, but so will the life support system. The color in the last crystal is fading. We could be dead soon.

I have tried in vain to learn the controls… too alien and strange.

I declare my love for Meva to whoever finds this.

More Desperation

I have decided to do the only thing that might save us. I will use the soul transfer device to put myself into the ship. Then I might be able to figure out how to operate the ship’s foreign controls.

At first, Meva begged me not to do it. She reminded me of the risks and of the strange things that had happened to some of the spirds. But eventually, even she saw the necessity of it. I would either die from starvation, lying on the floor of the ship, or I would die trying to save us. Meva kissed me and relented.

A Crazy Plan

We clamped one of the soul transfer device’s arms onto the control panel, and the other onto my arm. Meva reminded me that she would only give me one minute. She wasn't going to risk any more time. I nodded and she pushed the button. The purple fuzz-ball beating inside the device cast light around the room, and I went into the ship.

The first sensation I felt was a lack of feelings. The aching hunger was gone. The pangs of starvation that wracked my body had slipped away in an instant. It was a relief. But then I remembered the short time I had and turned my mind to other things.

I could sense our place in space. Nearby planets and stars took shape in my mind and their names came to me, although I'd never seen them before. I realized the ship must have some navigational computer or log. At this thought more information poured into me. I could see the ship’s entire history in a moment. But my mind grasped at another image; P's crib.

P’s crib was being pulled aboard by a desperate looking crew during the heat of battle. The ship's door was sealed before taking off. The crib was chained to the wall. P was force-fed cans of beans to increase her output of P-tonium. She didn't laugh or smile. The crew's planet needed the P-tonium to survive. There were other planets that wanted the P-tonium too, and were willing to kill for it. As far as the ship’s computer identified P as the last of her kind.

Meva's voice echoed inside me. She was telling me to hurry. She was going to transfer me back.

In a panic, I pulled my mind from the computer, though there were so many more questions I knew it could answer, but I had to get to that control panel. Its levers and knobs were instantly familiar to me. I dimmed the bright lights that made it difficult to sleep. I discovered a water generator had been switched off. I turned it on, and the ship’s water storage began to fill.

But something was wrong. Not all of the controls were working. I could only make a minor adjustment to our speed. I could not reverse our course, and I could not change our trajectory. I dove deeper into these controls, tracing their connections until I found the problem. There were two dents in the hull where the ship had been hit by missiles while escaping. One had torn the metal open and damaged the ship’s controls.

I used the navigational computer to quickly chart a course. We were headed for a nearby planet. I calculated how long it would take to reach it.

At that moment, I woke up to the sensation of liquid on my face. Meva had pulled me out. She was smiling, holding a container of cool water. I drank it down in big gulps, but it did little to satiate the gnawing hunger in my stomach, or the growing fear in my mind.

I told her the bad news. We were about to crash land, and there was nothing we could do to stop it.

Life After the Crash

A crash landing is difficult to describe with accuracy. When in the middle of it, I did not think the tumbling would end. It was more like an assault than an event to my mind. Surrounded by noise and violence, papers, paneling and even my own clothing blurred past my face. I remember the weird details in times of crisis that come for no apparent reason; I saw a metal tool tumble by, I looked at my own hand and considered my own anatomy in slow motion. I do not know why these are the things I remember.

When it was finally over, we climbed from the wreckage, with few injuries. Meva's arm was broken. I was bleeding from a gash in my forehead. P's crib had landed on top of her, but instead of harming her it kept objects from crushing her. At the time I thought it probably saved her life.

Behind us was a jagged line scratched into the planet’s surface that documented the trajectory of our landing. Pieces of our ship was ripped from the hull by trees and rocks and scattered to either side of that line. The air was thicker than our home planet, but gravity was comparable and a yellow haze protected us from direct sunlight.

Meva knew enough of the healing arts to talk me through resetting her arm … a difficult ordeal. She and P took shelter under low hanging branches while I went in search of anything that could be salvaged from the wreckage.

Over the course of that day I dragged chunks of the ship’s carcass back to Meva, where she, using her one good arm, assembled a makeshift shelter. P seemed oblivious to the peril of our situation. I would put bushes on my head and dance around for her which consistently made her giggle. P’s happiness was a comfort to Meva.

The first night we huddled together in our shelter and listened to strange animal noises that put a chill in our bones. This planet sounded all the more threatening and I knew it would be a matter of time before a beast broke into our temporary housing.

Most days I worked on the water generator. The few stores of water we had were nearly exhausted, and a survey of the area revealed no water though there were plants growing on the hillside that I assumed used water to survive. The water generator wouldn’t power on and I considered leaving Meva and P to go on a more exhaustive search for water. Another howl, deep and brooding came from the forest as if to threaten me if I ventured too far from camp.

Our love for P motivated us to keep trying and it kept us from falling into despair.

I fused three wires on the water generator and it came on for a few seconds, then made a popping sound and seized up in a cloud of smoke. I feared I might have damaged it beyond repair so in desperation I used the soul transfer device to put myself into that infernal machine! Once inside, I could clearly see what must be done. I also discovered that the water generator was actually a matter generator. It could pull water from anywhere because it changed the array of any molecule into water. With a little work, the water generator became a matter generator. I was able to make simple objects with it. I started with bricks, then made hammers, screws, bolts and basic levers.

I repaired the power grid! Using the green engine room as a power generator, we fed Ptonium into the grid it offered more than enough power for anything we needed.

Previous Visitors

During the day when there were less animals roaming around, Meva and I explored the surrounding area to discover we landed on the far end of a long valley. On the opposite end of the valley we found a rock with testimonies of previous visitors scratched onto its great surface. We do not know who wrote them, but wrote a commentary on each of them to acknowledge that they are part of our history:

BOHRAM

He was a great scientist who flew to this planet hoping to perform experiments using an artifact of time bending. The date next to Bohram’s name suggests that he landed on the planet some five hundred in the future, and the space maps he drew are beyond the accuracy and scope of contemporary maps. Bohram discovered a planet he named 26229 and was considered by the future scientific establishment as having similar parameters to his home planet. Bohram applied his time bending theories to space travel and blasted off to live on planet 26229. His last words are here carved into stone before leaving, "Let us get this show on the road."

OKROG

He was a great military commander. Okrog’s body was so badly injured in various wars that it was mostly replaced by machine parts, including fifteen-foot robotic legs. One day his suit was so badly injured in battle that he used a furnace-tending suit as a replacement. He could no longer fight in wars, but he could still tend to the furnace so he remained thankful. He had a strange pet, a flat faced Tentable Mane Cephia Kraken.

ZILETH

An adventurous blind girl named Zileth wore the 7th Ring of Eureka while hiking and it transported her to a far away land. She lost her old guide animal and went hunting for a new guide animal, known as a half-mongrel. A half-mongrel will not tolerate being stared at so he never got mad at blind Zileth. She scratched his soft fur and felt his facial expressions to learn his moods. They became inseparable friends. Zileth never returned home but always had company to keep her warm thanks to her half-mongrel.

HEVERKROG

There was once a scientist who spent so much time in his laboratory alone that he went mad. This is Heverkrog, the inventor of the Procrastinator Ray. He hated this planet but found he could not leave. This made him angry because he thought that he was so smart (and he was smart) that he would be able to find a way off of the planet. He began work on a portal to another dimension. This technology is fictional at best, but he claimed to get the idea from his deceased wife who visited him in a dream while in feverish delirium. Heverkrog built his interdimensional gate, which looked like four logs bound together by rope.

We found "the gate", but also found a book of Heverkrog’s mad theories next to his skeleton which lay at the base of the gate. For reasons of my own, I believe Heverkrog has something to do with the disappearance of Bohram.

BLACKTON

Claimed to discover cave walls covered in ancient finger-paintings. His devices of measurement dated the paint used on the wall to be at least five thousand years old. These could be the oldest inhabitants of the planet. The most fascinating thing about the cave paintings was that they depicted ninety nine generations who came before them. The first of that line could be the first being ever to live. The long lineage could also imply that this lineage went on forever into the past and that only ninety-nine beings could fit on the wall before the most recent generation ran out of space. One other being is scribbled on the edge of the wall, he has a head, two arms and two legs like most beings we know, but he is covered in warm flesh, has hair on his head and wears unique hat and shoes. A translation of the inscription under this cave painting says sounds something like, "HUMUN BING. FRUM URTH" but none of us know what that means.

LUGNESS

Lugness is an honorable and noble being who lived just over twelve hundred years ago. He invented an R.G.Ba’bomb that altered the light of any area within a stone’s throw. Lugness discovered a distant star that radiated green Ptonium energy. One day, that distant planet mysteriously stopped emitting Ptonium energy. This is speculation but could this have something to do with P?

NICKELNAUT

Walter "Nickel" Naut was the first astronaut from the planet Ixen to find this world some two hundred and seventy two years ago. His ship did not run on Ntonium, but on magic. That was back when magic was real. He came to this planet entirely by accident when he crossed a then-unknown hyperspace lane. Nickelnaut was jettisoned across the universe sideways before ejecting from his craft just before crashing to the planet surface.

This concludes my commentary on the history written on stone.

Building Statues

I used the generator to build statues of my own likeness and I gave them simple mechanized skeletons so they could help me work. They were capable of working even if I left the room. They were linked by a nerve net so if I transferred my soul into one, I could move between them. With my crew of mechanical workers we built three great towers and one lesser tower that would be modeled after Meva’s likeness. A great surrounding wall was erected to keep any hostile animals out.

Meva and I wrote out laws on walls, over doorposts, and in journals. Even the statues were capable of repeating the laws. We wanted P to be raised in a family that respected each other first and the self, second. We assume that P would long outlive us. It is our desire that these laws be the foundation of our little society.

The Name

This fortress has been built to protect my family and our ways.

These words have been written so that you may know us better.

If you are friend, then take shelter, for to you we freely give this place.

But be warned, however, if you seek to bring harm to this family, I have already bent my will against you. Though I am a kind and gentle friend, I am an even fiercer, terrifying enemy. If your designs are for harm, I will unleash Meva's wrath upon you. The three engines will ignite and the harbinger will be awakened!

Enemies, know the name of this fortress and fear it; “Armikrog.”

[capricornus-rex]

i live for you qUEEN! i LOVE your writing. if you have the time, could you do a fic where reader is the most reckless badass and Cal is like ‘wait don’t do THAT’ and she is just ‘im living life BABYY’. she does the most insane things that always somehow work and Cal is literally like what the F*CK’. reader is basically a GOD. please and thank you🙏🥳

Hi Queen~! Sorry if I have taken a while in writing this fic. But still, I hope I didn’t keep you waiting for too long and I hope you enjoy this fic! 💝

“Bad Ideas Make Good Memories” | Cal Kestis x Reader

Additional tags: Rebel fleet, Rebel base

Also posted in AO3

Next: Part 2 | Masterlist

1 of ?

Imperials have targeted the small rebel base of Andaro, a planet rich in resources such as ores for metals and substances that can be converted into fuel, however, in order to get such prizes they have to fight through the rebel cell that hinders them from doing so.

“What good can a small band of insurgents do? They have no match against our forces!”

The Moff Sedho Loon barked confidently from the bridge of his Star Destroyer, the blue glow of the planet’s hologram projection highlighted the wrinkles along his once-prominent cheekbones.

The ship operators followed his order to chart a course to the planet.

“We will arrive in T-minus 15 minutes if we make the jump to hyperspace,” a cadet reported from his computer station.

“They’ll never see us coming,” the Moff sniggered. “Prepare the calculations and accelerate at will.”

“Yessir!”

Meanwhile in the planet’s surface, the Mantis crew has proved to the rebels that they’re in the same team. The Mantis backed up the base’s crude technology when it comes to communications and signals, that’s where Cere comes into the picture. You and Cal offered whatever help you can, Merrin proved herself that she can fight and quite stealthily too, and Greez offered his cooking skills to make sure the rebels don’t fight with an empty stomach.

You and Cal lounge in the hangar where the fighter ships are, they were an interesting bunch: retrofitted starfighters, gunships, and transport ships from the Republic era.

“Have you ever flown a starfighter before?” you thought out loud, directing the question to Cal.

“Well, once or twice, but I always stayed close to Master Tapal,”

“Did you…” you trailed “See some in Bracca?”

Cal recalls that one wrecked Jedi Interceptor that sat on the wing of a Venator. Unconsciously, he rubbed his fingers together, as if the grime that he stroked off from that fighter ship’s fin remained.

“Yeah, only one,”

That topic never continued, but you’re still examining the pair of Jedi Interceptors that were loaned to you. Cal saw you climbing up into the cockpit.

“Whoa hey, we’re still in clear, [y/n]!”

The astromech droids in each starfighter beeped in reaction, concurring to Cal, and you settled yourself in the pilot’s seat.

“Relax, I’m just getting a feel of it before we actually do get some action,” you shrugged.

The glass dome remained up. Your eyes panned left and right on the dashboard controls, remembering the functions of each and every switch. Trembling hands closed in on the steering wheel, you hesitate for a few moments, until your hands curled around the curved shafts and your thumbs rested above the trigger buttons.

Nostalgia overwhelmed you that you had to take a breath. Memories, both fond and sad, played in your mind—the thrill of a dogfight, the satisfaction of taking down vulture droids, and the horror of watching one of your ships go down.

“You okay in there, [y/n]?” Cal called.

“Yeah, just… Just getting a feel of things again,”

You decided to dismount the ship and the astromech droid appeared to be conversing with you using trills and beeps.

“You’ll have my back out there, won’t you R-12?”

The droid beeped in a cheery response and you smiled back in response.

“Thanks, little guy!”

Meanwhile, Cere was tinkering in the ship’s communications until a nearly-invisible blip blinking in the radar caught her eye. She leaned closer to the monitor—her suspicion had gotten the best of her—and focused on that tiny, unassuming mark. A few moments later, the blip started blinking rapidly and became more opaque on the screens by the second.

“Oh no…!” she gasped, she didn’t expect it to be within Greez’s earshot.

“What? What’s up?”

“We’re gonna have company!”

Cere sprang out of her seat and ran out of the ship. She sprinted towards the rebel leader conferring with her guerilla fighters.

“Miccah! Captain Miccah!”

The captain instantly caught the urgency of Cere’s voice. She allowed the woman to catch her breath and collect her words.

“Cere, what is it?”

“The Imperials…!” the former Jedi huffed. “They’re coming out of hyperspace!”

“Do you know how many are there?”

“I don’t know, but it’s a fleet—we can only anticipate that they’ll have fighters deployed on us!”

The fighters murmured amongst one another in the presence of their leader, anticipating for Captain Miccah to start barking orders—which she did in the next second. The captain’s jaw clenched, her grip tightened around the handle of her blaster rifle, and turned to her soldiers.

“People, man your battlestations!”

“Alright, you heard the captain!”

The rebels dispersed, spreading the captain’s word, and within a minute, everybody starts scrambling around the base—barking orders here and there, clapping their hands to coax the people to move double time, and the pilots were already donning their protective aerial assault gear.

You and Cal were still standing by the ships when Cere came running towards the captain. Neither of you heard their conversation, but you can take the hint that something’s not right. Your assumption was verified when you heard the captain start barking order and everyone scattered across the place.

“Wow, sooner than I thought,” you blurted.

Cal noted the mischievous smile on your face, you’ve been practically thirsting for action—and your brand of fun—before either of you could climb up to your ships, Cere walked up to you to relay her report to the captain.

“Imperials are approaching the planet, they’re coming out of hyperspace,”

“Does that mean we get to fly these bad boys now?”

“Yes, but!” Cere firmly emphasized the last word with a finger pointed at you. “Stay alive out there and lay low with the stunts?”

Cal turned to gaze at you, anticipating what response is going to come out of your mouth, he noticed that sly smirk curling about on your lips while having your arms crossed with one another.

You shrugged, “Sure!”

When Cere left you to return to the Mantis, Cal stopped you from jumping back into your ships.

“Oh man, I know that look. You’re planning something!”

“Am not!” you chortled.

The two of you proceeded to hop into your respective starfighters, the astromech droids have already done the initial preparations for you.

“She’s definitely planning something,” Cal whispered to his astromech droid, R-16.

“You know, you shouldn’t put your headset on while saying something I shouldn’t be hearing!” you wired through the communications.

Cal laughed as he’s caught in the act. Despite your youthful adrenaline pumping in your system, the two of you put your heads in the game—since the rebels assigned you as the vanguard of the airstrike.

“I love you,” he cooed, compensating for that comment he made seconds ago.

You smiled to yourself, but he felt it through your response, “I know.”

[iellarenuodolorian]

Mandoctober Day 7

Razor Crest

Words: 1.4k (wow, oops that happened)

Pairing: Din DjarinxFemale Mandalorian Reader

Warnings: injury, pain, nightmares, the slight angst is paired with fluff

~14 BBY

Six hours later the med droid finally came out to give you an update in its flat, monotonous mechanical voice.

“He is stable for now. He had extensive injuries that required him to be sedated in the bacta tank. He will not wake up for at least another twelve hours. I suggest you go home. We will alert you if there are any changes.”

With a sigh of resignation, you slowly stood up, muscles protesting from being in one position for so long. Ailyn would probably be needing help with his ship, and there was no point staying here. The droid wouldn’t let you in to see him anyway.

When you reached his ship, you finally saw how bad the damage really was. You couldn’t believe he had managed to land it. Ok, it was more of a crash landing, but he walked away from it...with your help. Honestly, you were joking with yourself because it was that bad, and the reality of how close you had been to losing him sunk in. There were holes everywhere in the hull, and so many of them that even if he had managed to seal off the cockpit it wouldn’t have been that much help to him. Whoever had gotten the best of him had to have been on kriffing good pilot, Djarin was a better pilot than you.

As you came closer, you found Ailyn in the cockpit laying on the floor with wires everywhere around her.

“Your boyfriend did a bang up job this time. How is he?”

“You know he’s not my boyfriend Ailyn. The droids say it was bad, and from looking at his ship I see why. The droid said he would make it, but he won’t wake up for at least another twelve hours. I have that much time to help you get as much of this put back together as we can.”

“Well then, grab a ‘spanner and start helping me rewire the central computer. Luckily, damage to the navicomputer and the targeting system was minimal, but all the connections to the central computer have to be reconstructed.”

“He would be that unlucky.”

“He is friends with you.”

You kicked Ailyn’s boot and made a rude hand gesture toward her.

“Yeah, and so are you so what does that say about you?”

“I’ve known you longer, your rotten luck doesn’t affect me now.”

Four hours later, the two of you had finished rewiring all the connections in the cockpit. One hour to run diagnostics and see which pipes needed to be replaced or patched for the cooling and other various systems, and two more hours to fix those. Ailyn had suggested using a special patch for the hull that would help reinforce it in the future. The yellow-orange stripes running diagonally down the sides and across the top of the ship would give it a distinctive marking, but as long as it helped hold the ship together better you hoped Djarin wouldn’t mind.

Patching the hull took the better part of five hours, and at that point you realized Djarin was supposed to be waking up sometime soon and you wanted to be there to find out what happened. You would never be able to repay Ailyn for helping you with this project.

“I leave today to travel to where my new clan is going into hiding. I will miss you ner vod.” Said Ailyn. “Make sure you tell him he owes me a favor and to be more careful with his ship. Razor Crest. She’s a beauty, I’ll give him that.”

“I will tell him. I will miss you more, ner vod. Thank you for your help.”

You gave your sister one last hug before going back to the medcenter to see if Djarin had woken up yet. No sooner had you walked in the door, than the droid walked over to inform you that Djarin was awake and that he had been asking for you.

When you walked into his room, he was eating, which meant no helmet. So you reached up to remove yours because at that point you had realized you had not eaten since yesterday. At his invitation you sat down on the end of his bed and pointed to the fruit he hadn’t touched yet, a silent question of if you could eat it. Between bites of fruit you told him about what happened yesterday with the meeting of the clans, and how everyone was being asked to go into hiding and not reveal their faces and names to protect the Mandalorian way of life until a plan was established to rid the Galaxy of the Empire.

“I was only on the fourth system on my list when I stumbled on a secret base. They had captured me and asked if I served the Empire or if I was independent. “ He told you. “I told them I hated the Empire because they were the product of the Clone War that took my parents away from me. They told me they were a small faction of rebels who were trying to form a Rebellion to fight the Empire. I laughed at them and wished them luck with their mission. They let me go, but I knew it was too easy. I was barely out of the atmosphere when x-wings came up behind me and tried to shoot me down before I could jump into hyperspace. I barely made it, as you saw. Did the Crest survive?”

You took a deep breath and tried to process what he had told you.

“Yes, the Crest made it. Barely. Ailyn and I patched her up and she’s almost as good as new. You just have to put the final minute details into place and make sure the settings are all to your specifications and you should be good to go. Ailyn says you owe her big time, by the way. She is already gone with her new clan.”

Djarin reached across the table and placed his hand on top of yours and whispered “I’m sorry. I know she is like a sister to you.”

You gave a small smile and grasped his hand tighter, not trusting your words.

“I need to finish packing and loading the last of my belongings into my ship. I leave in two days for my new clan.”

“The med droid said something about discharging me if I could keep food down. I want to spend as much time with you before you go, if you’ll have me.” The sad look in his eyes and the way he gripped your hand made your heart melt. How were you ever going to be able to say goodbye to him?

With a small nod you agreed to his request and left to take care of one last idea that had just come to your mind before Djarin was discharged. You went back to the Crest and installed a tracking beacon so that you would always be able to find him in the Galaxy. If you weren’t there to watch his back, who would? The mixing of all the different clans together was sure to cause problems, in addition to Djarin not always being the best at thinking a plan totally through.

You were putting the last of your belongings in a trunk when Djarin knocked on your door. You spent the rest of the night watching a few holovids and snacking on treats and enjoying each other’s company. You both finally fell asleep during the second ‘vid just before sunrise, but you woke up when Djarin started shouting in his sleep. You rushed to Ailyn’s bed that he had borrowed for the night to wake him up, and when he opened his eyes you saw pure terror in them with just a hint of tears in the corners. After holding him in a hug and running your fingers through his curls for a while he settled down. He refused to let go of you, and so you settled in beside him with his head on your chest and your fingers in his hair until you both finally fell asleep again. You wanted to ask what his nightmare was about, but if he didn’t want to share then that was his business. You were more than content to hold him for as long as he needed it. In another life maybe you could allow yourself to fall in love with him on a night like this, but for now you would hold on to these memories and trust them to give you strength when you needed it. With a kiss to his forehead that elicited a contented sigh from Djarin, you closed your eyes and tried to fall back asleep.

Mando’a words:

Ner vod- my sister

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Thank you for taking the time to read my silly little story! It means the world to me 💙💙

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Germany demands an end to working cryptography

Germany's Interior Minister Horst Seehofer -- a hardliner who has called for cameras at every "hot spot" in Germany -- has announced that he will seek a ban on working cryptography in Germany; he will insist that companies only supply insecure tools that have a backdoor that will allow the German state to decrypt messages and chats on demand.

He's said that he'll ban any service or app that does not comply with the rule.

If this sounds familiar, it should: it's basically the rule Australia enacted in December 2018. It's also been repeatedly proposed by Rod Rosenstein in his capacity as US Deputy Attorney General; and by GCHQ's Technical Director, Ian Levy.

I wrote a comprehensive explainer about this in 2017 when Theresa May proposed it. Here it is again, because honestly, the idea hasn't gotten any less stupid over two years.

Aaron Swartz once said, "It's no longer OK not to understand how the Internet works."

He was talking to law-makers, policy-makers and power-brokers, people who were, at best, half-smart about technology -- just smart enough to understand that in a connected world, every problem society has involves computers, and just stupid enough to demand that computers be altered to solve those problems.

Paging Theresa May.

Theresa May says that last night's London terror attacks mean that the internet cannot be allowed to provide a "safe space" for terrorists and therefore working cryptography must be banned in the UK.

This is a golden oldie, a classic piece of foolish political grandstanding. May's predecessor, David Cameron, repeatedly campaigned on this one, and every time he did, I wrote a long piece rebutting him. Rather than writing a new one for May, I thought I'd just dust off a pair of my Cameron-era pieces (1, 2), since every single word still applies.

Theresa May says there should be no "means of communication" which "we cannot read" -- and no doubt many in her party will agree with her, politically. But if they understood the technology, they would be shocked to their boots.

It’s impossible to overstate how bonkers the idea of sabotaging cryptography is to people who understand information security. If you want to secure your sensitive data either at rest – on your hard drive, in the cloud, on that phone you left on the train last week and never saw again – or on the wire, when you’re sending it to your doctor or your bank or to your work colleagues, you have to use good cryptography. Use deliberately compromised cryptography, that has a back door that only the “good guys” are supposed to have the keys to, and you have effectively no security. You might as well skywrite it as encrypt it with pre-broken, sabotaged encryption.

There are two reasons why this is so. First, there is the question of whether encryption can be made secure while still maintaining a “master key” for the authorities’ use. As lawyer/computer scientist Jonathan Mayer explained, adding the complexity of master keys to our technology will “introduce unquantifiable security risks”. It’s hard enough getting the security systems that protect our homes, finances, health and privacy to be airtight – making them airtight except when the authorities don’t want them to be is impossible.

What Theresa May thinks she's saying is, "We will command all the software creators we can reach to introduce back-doors into their tools for us." There are enormous problems with this: there's no back door that only lets good guys go through it. If your Whatsapp or Google Hangouts has a deliberately introduced flaw in it, then foreign spies, criminals, crooked police (like those who fed sensitive information to the tabloids who were implicated in the hacking scandal -- and like the high-level police who secretly worked for organised crime for years), and criminals will eventually discover this vulnerability. They -- and not just the security services -- will be able to use it to intercept all of our communications. That includes things like the pictures of your kids in your bath that you send to your parents to the trade secrets you send to your co-workers.

But this is just for starters. Theresa May doesn't understand technology very well, so she doesn't actually know what she's asking for.

For Theresa May's proposal to work, she will need to stop Britons from installing software that comes from software creators who are out of her jurisdiction. The very best in secure communications are already free/open source projects, maintained by thousands of independent programmers around the world. They are widely available, and thanks to things like cryptographic signing, it is possible to download these packages from any server in the world (not just big ones like Github) and verify, with a very high degree of confidence, that the software you've downloaded hasn't been tampered with.

May is not alone here. The regime she proposes is already in place in countries like Syria, Russia, and Iran (for the record, none of these countries have had much luck with it). There are two means by which authoritarian governments have attempted to restrict the use of secure technology: by network filtering and by technology mandates.

Theresa May has already shown that she believes she can order the nation's ISPs to block access to certain websites (again, for the record, this hasn't worked very well). The next step is to order Chinese-style filtering using deep packet inspection, to try and distinguish traffic and block forbidden programs. This is a formidable technical challenge. Intrinsic to core Internet protocols like IPv4/6, TCP and UDP is the potential to "tunnel" one protocol inside another. This makes the project of figuring out whether a given packet is on the white-list or the black-list transcendentally hard, especially if you want to minimise the number of "good" sessions you accidentally blackhole.

More ambitious is a mandate over which code operating systems in the UK are allowed to execute. This is very hard. We do have, in Apple's Ios platform and various games consoles, a regime where a single company uses countermeasures to ensure that only software it has blessed can run on the devices it sells to us. These companies could, indeed, be compelled (by an act of Parliament) to block secure software. Even there, you'd have to contend with the fact that other EU states and countries like the USA are unlikely to follow suit, and that means that anyone who bought her Iphone in Paris or New York could come to the UK with all their secure software intact and send messages "we cannot read."

But there is the problem of more open platforms, like GNU/Linux variants, BSD and other unixes, Mac OS X, and all the non-mobile versions of Windows. All of these operating systems are already designed to allow users to execute any code they want to run. The commercial operators -- Apple and Microsoft -- might conceivably be compelled by Parliament to change their operating systems to block secure software in the future, but that doesn't do anything to stop people from using all the PCs now in existence to run code that the PM wants to ban.

More difficult is the world of free/open operating systems like GNU/Linux and BSD. These operating systems are the gold standard for servers, and widely used on desktop computers (especially by the engineers and administrators who run the nation's IT). There is no legal or technical mechanism by which code that is designed to be modified by its users can co-exist with a rule that says that code must treat its users as adversaries and seek to prevent them from running prohibited code.

This, then, is what Theresa May is proposing:

* All Britons' communications must be easy for criminals, voyeurs and foreign spies to intercept

* Any firms within reach of the UK government must be banned from producing secure software

* All major code repositories, such as Github and Sourceforge, must be blocked

* Search engines must not answer queries about web-pages that carry secure software

* Virtually all academic security work in the UK must cease -- security research must only take place in proprietary research environments where there is no onus to publish one's findings, such as industry R&D and the security services

* All packets in and out of the country, and within the country, must be subject to Chinese-style deep-packet inspection and any packets that appear to originate from secure software must be dropped

* Existing walled gardens (like Ios and games consoles) must be ordered to ban their users from installing secure software

* Anyone visiting the country from abroad must have their smartphones held at the border until they leave

* Proprietary operating system vendors (Microsoft and Apple) must be ordered to redesign their operating systems as walled gardens that only allow users to run software from an app store, which will not sell or give secure software to Britons

* Free/open source operating systems -- that power the energy, banking, ecommerce, and infrastructure sectors -- must be banned outright

Theresa May will say that she doesn't want to do any of this. She'll say that she can implement weaker versions of it -- say, only blocking some "notorious" sites that carry secure software. But anything less than the programme above will have no material effect on the ability of criminals to carry on perfectly secret conversations that "we cannot read". If any commodity PC or jailbroken phone can run any of the world's most popular communications applications, then "bad guys" will just use them. Jailbreaking an OS isn't hard. Downloading an app isn't hard. Stopping people from running code they want to run is -- and what's more, it puts the whole nation -- individuals and industry -- in terrible jeopardy.

That’s a technical argument, and it’s a good one, but you don’t have to be a cryptographer to understand the second problem with back doors: the security services are really bad at overseeing their own behaviour.

Once these same people have a back door that gives them access to everything that encryption protects, from the digital locks on your home or office to the information needed to clean out your bank account or read all your email, there will be lots more people who’ll want to subvert the vast cohort that is authorised to use the back door, and the incentives for betraying our trust will be much more lavish than anything a tabloid reporter could afford.

If you want a preview of what a back door looks like, just look at the US Transportation Security Administration’s “master keys” for the locks on our luggage. Since 2003, the TSA has required all locked baggage travelling within, or transiting through, the USA to be equipped with Travelsentry locks, which have been designed to allow anyone with a widely held master key to open them.

What happened after Travelsentry went into effect? Stuff started going missing from bags. Lots and lots of stuff. A CNN investigation into thefts from bags checked in US airports found thousands of incidents of theft committed by TSA workers and baggage handlers. And though “aggressive investigation work” has cut back on theft at some airports, insider thieves are still operating with impunity throughout the country, even managing to smuggle stolen goods off the airfield in airports where all employees are searched on their way in and out of their work areas.

The US system is rigged to create a halo of buck-passing unaccountability. When my family picked up our bags from our Easter holiday in the US, we discovered that the TSA had smashed the locks off my nearly new, unlocked, Travelsentry-approved bag, taping it shut after confirming it had nothing dangerous in it, and leaving it “completely destroyed” in the words of the official BA damage report. British Airways has sensibly declared the damage to be not their problem, as they had nothing to do with destroying the bag. The TSA directed me to a form that generated an illiterate reply from a government subcontractor, sent from a do-not-reply email address, advising that “TSA is not liable for any damage to locks or bags that are required to be opened by force for security purposes” (the same note had an appendix warning me that I should treat this communication as confidential). I’ve yet to have any other communications from the TSA.

Making it possible for the state to open your locks in secret means that anyone who works for the state, or anyone who can bribe or coerce anyone who works for the state, can have the run of your life. Cryptographic locks don’t just protect our mundane communications: cryptography is the reason why thieves can’t impersonate your fob to your car’s keyless ignition system; it’s the reason you can bank online; and it’s the basis for all trust and security in the 21st century.

In her Dimbleby lecture, Martha Lane Fox recalled Aaron Swartz’s words: “It’s not OK not to understand the internet anymore.” That goes double for cryptography: any politician caught spouting off about back doors is unfit for office anywhere but Hogwarts, which is also the only educational institution whose computer science department believes in “golden keys” that only let the right sort of people break your encryption.

(Image:

Facepalm

, Brandon Grasley, CC-BY)

https://boingboing.net/2019/05/24/koenig-canute.html

[rinas-ninjas]

Chapter 22

Prologue - Chapt 21 - Chapt 23

They found him on the worn forest trail. A young boy collapsed on the road, running a fever and shivering like mad. Brad trailed behind his father as he scooped up the child and jogged back to their village with a grim look of concern. He watched as the boy was gently set on his bed with a cool cloth set on his forehead. His hair was a light, almost white blond, plastered to his head with sweat and water. If it weren’t for the fevered flush on his face, he’d be pale. Brad had heard about people coming down from the mountain with a fever and chills, but never one this young. No one in their right mind would let their child go near the icy ridge, let alone by themselves.

“Get your mother, she’ll know what to do.” Brad took off down the road to his mother’s clinic. Mrs. Tudabone was the village’s head doctor, if anyone could heal the boy she could. He looked about Brad’s own age. It made his lack of company even more concerning. He burst into the front room, bolting past the entryway and into the exam room. They were back at the house in minutes, his mother storming into the room like a hurricane.

And then they waited. And waited.

By the time Brad fell asleep on the couch, the boy still hadn’t woken up.

“Okay, yeah sure, but what if you could?” Zane sighed.

“Jay, for the last time, I can not simply take my brain out and put it into a computer. That is pure science fiction.”         Jay shrugged as they walked along, his hands behind his head.

“Just saying, it would be cool! We could wire you into the monastery, you could be a smart house! A Zane house!” Nya laughed at his wild idea. Jay had kept the conversation fairly light along their journey to the rainforest tomb. He’d taken to theorizing about who Zane’s father was, and why he’d built him. “Maybe he was just lonely. I know I would be in the middle of that forest, down in the workshop all day.”

Zane had taken it all in stride, growing more relaxed as the day went on. “I believe he wanted a legacy. Something good to leave behind.” One memory had stood out from all the others. “He told me I was meant to protect those who could not protect themselves.” He smiled to himself. More of his memories were returning, each one full of warmth and care. He wanted to sit back and let them wash over him…but he had to focus on the task at hand.

They’d been traveling for the better part of a day, and still no sign of Lloyd. The others were relieved to have left behind the frigid forest, but the growing humidity was quickly becoming uncomfortable. Jay was already beginning to look a little red from the sun, and Nya had taken off her long-sleeved undershirt in the last town they passed through.

“Well I’m glad we’ve got you looking for Lloyd with us then, Zane.” Said girl was growing more and more relaxed as the weather warmed, but she was still tense. “We just need to get him home soon.”

Jay frowned at her sad tone. No matter how he and Zane insisted, it was clear Nya still blamed herself for Lloyd’s kidnapping. It had been her idea, sure, but who expects ancient snakes on a camping trip? Plus, Kai had been the one to send Lloyd running off into the night. But if they’d just been allowed to go on missions with the others…Jay let out a sigh. Really, they were all to blame for this. He just hoped they found the little guy soon.

“You’re finally awake.” Brad stared at the boy in surprise. When his fever had lasted through the night, he wasn’t sure the boy would last long. Yet here he was, sitting up and looking around, blinking sluggishly at his surroundings. He made to get up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed.

“Whoa hold on!” Brad pushed the kid back down. “If you get up before Mom sees you she’ll kill me.” The boy seemed to stare through him – his eyes were dull and clouded. They sent chills down Brad’s spine, despite how warm it was. He didn’t say a word, even as Brad stepped out to go get his mom again. When they stepped back in the room, he hadn’t moved a muscle. Brad hovered in the doorway, watching him suspiciously.

“Alright hon, put this under your tongue.” The boy slowly complied, that blank look never leaving his face. “At least it’s gone down…what’s your name, sweetie?” He was silent, just staring ahead. Mrs. Tudabone continued, checking on him and asking him questions. “Hey, I need to call you something. Where are your parents?” More silence. “You’re a quiet one, that’s for sure.” She rose to her feet, passing Brad in the doorway.

“Make sure he drinks some water, honey. His fever’s gone down…I’m going to check if anyone’s missing him around town.” He heard her mumbling about irresponsibility and parenting on her way out.

He stepped back into the room. The boy was still seated on the bed, staring into space with a blank expression. “If you’re scared of someone, Mom won’t tell.” No response. “You don’t have to ignore her. Or me.” Brad rolled his eyes at being ignored. “Or you can just not talk, and she’ll send you to child services in Ninjago city. Whatever.” He stomped out of the room. “At least drink the water on the table. Mom says you should be fine once you have some fluids in your system.”

He left the boy sitting on the bed, still staring. Lloyd’s eyes watched him walk away and shut the door, leaving him alone. His legs straightened and carried him to the window. His hands lifted it open and climbed through. By the time Brad checked on him later, he was gone without a trace, leaving only an empty cup on the nightstand.

[kindofwriter]

The first ever AI: or is it?

Is this an alright story? I’ve been told so many times that my taste in literature is so abstract and removed from what other people like that I’ll never be able to write an enjoyable narrative. Before I develop anything I just want to know if this is ok. Not good, just acceptable.

Briefly (or as briefly as I can):

The story starts with a young man taking out the trash. He’s told to take it to a proper waste removal plant, but decides that that’s too far out of his way. He takes a look at what he’s suppose to be disposing of, and is terrified to discover it’s a human body. Upon closer inspection he realises it’s actually a very convincing human-shaped robot and tosses it in a dumpster.

Then the proper story begins. It’s ~2235. We have robots, but not AI, that have taken over a lot of manual labour, service jobs, and medical procedures. After a huge population spike a few billion were killed due to global warming, meaning there are huge cities that now have the population of towns. Folding phones and interactive holograms are the norm, but some older tech (3D kindles, wireless headphones) has hung around. In the US the middle and lower classes have joined to form socialist state governments, but the upper classes remain in control of large business and the federal government. Average life expectancy is ~90 years.

Our MC Iris, 19 y/o college student studying coding and robotics and part-time teacher, is walking home. Upon spotting an insanely complex robot just discarded on top of a dumpster she puts it on the trolley with her robotics projects and takes it home.

She lives with her mother who used to be a kind, supportive parent, but began to develop symptoms of dementia nine years ago. Now she’s hostile, forgetful, and abusives. Iris avoids her at all costs, and only stays because of monetary issues. She spends as much time as possible out of the house.

In her room, Iris sets about fixing up the robot. The tech’s a little more complex than what she’s used to, but she adapts. The robot looks horrifyingly like a human man, complete with overgrown hair and blood and tissue, but mimicking this is completely possible with 3D printing tech.

The robot has circuitry in its head, with wires connecting to its spine, a robotic hand, trachea, and voice box, a heart-sleeve, a robotic arm, and a faulty robotic foot + shin. Most other things seem to be printed cells.

Once she’s put the finishing touches on the robot’s head it wakes up, instantly panicking and trying to run away, but its damaged foot prevents this. After a lot of struggling, failed attempts to speak, and a lot of shushing from Iris, the robot becomes tired and ‘powers down.’

While it ‘sleeps’ Iris tries to see what kind of tasks it’s coded for, as it behaved very strangely, but she can’t find anything besides basic bodily functions. She fixes its voice box then goes to sleep.

When Iris wakes up the robot is gone, but she can hear her mom in the kitchen so gets up. It isn’t her mom, but the robot, rummaging through her cupboards and eating as much junk food as it can find.

It sees Iris and apologies for last night, and for eating all her food, and introduces himself as Adam (ahaha, see what I did there? THE BIBLE). He says he’ll be leaving now.

Iris is very confused and wants to know more, so when Adam goes to drink some of her mom’s liquor she offers to buy him a drink somewhere else. They swap his hospital-like attire for a hoodie and one of her mom’s skirts (he’s too tall for the pants, but says he’s partial to skirts anyway).

As they leave the house Adam mentions that he has a family, but the wife he mentions created the code for AI 200 years ago, only to have her designs forbidden and confiscated by the feds. Iris assumes he is the first illegal AI, made by someone who found her plans, and is amazed.

Adam talks to her about working for a dangerous corporation - he doesn’t dare give her the details - and being forced to leave his home. Iris begins to piece together that he was created and coded to act like a regular worker, but forced to work like a non-sentient robot.

She starts to explain to him about AI and Nita Sarcar’s coding, during which he is captivated, but when she tells him Nita died ~150 years ago he looks horrified and excuses himself to the bathroom.

After a while Iris follows him and finds him curled up on the floor, sobbing violently. She marvels at the humanity of the AI, and how easily he can evoke an emotional response from her.

However as she comforts him he tells her that he’s a person and explains where he comes from. Nita Sarcar actually was his wife. They had two children and lived in suburban New York. He was, if he says so himself, an astounding biochemical engineer. His wife was a computer scientist.

A company hired him to create a cure for death. He took the job, but after a few months and some critical thinking he decided it was immoral to develop something that would allow the upper class to evade death. He quit.

But the company wouldn’t let him. They effectively kidnapped him, locking him in a lab until he finished the cure. For ages he refused, but after almost a year he was desperate to see his family, so began work again.

He was forced to test products on himself, and after a while, just to stay alive, he was forced to perform procedures.

As he developed the technology the people at the corporation began to use it themselves, slowly becoming immortal.

Eventually, after what he assumed to be around thirty years, Adam had created a syrum that would cure death in a single injection. He demanded to be returned to his family, but instead the corporation severed the circuitry in his foot, shutting down his entire robotics system, including the brain. Then they told someone to trash him.

He demands that they involve the police, but Iris explains that society is fragile, and the police aren’t allowed to interfere with upper class, federal business. He decides to interfere himself.

Adam and Iris return to her house where she makes him a crutch and supplies him with some tech (some of her own, some that just exists now, like cool future-knives) while Adam used the weird, futuristic hair styler to get rid of his matted hair. He still doesn’t look like a person and it bothers him.

Adam starts to leave and Iris begs him to let her go too. He doesn’t want her to, he admits it’s probably a suicide mission, but she explains that she doesn’t care. There is nothing left in the world for her to do; so far her life has been 19 years of nothingness. Even if it means dying, she’s desperate to get away from home and do something, anything. She also tells Adam that hearing him talk about his family kind of makes her heart ache. She imagines what her life would’ve been like if her parents had loved her.

Her mother hears them arguing and comes to confront Iris, becoming mad when she sees Adam. She accuses Iris of ‘trying to build herself a new mother again’ and tells her to leave and never come home again. Adam instantly agrees to let her come with him and they run.

Iris tells him that when she was eleven she tried to build her mother a new brain and put it in a robot to test it. Her mom found out and accused her of trying to replace her, destroying her project and locking her in her room, then forgetting about her. After a few days Iris had to escape through the window.

They go somewhere: an old mall, an old library, an old camper van - wherever fits the story, and plan an assault on the corporation. Along the way Adam learns that they concrete jungle they’re exploring isn’t actually NYC but rural New York: at some point it become so built up it was indistinguishable from the city.

Now I get to the point in my planning where I know something else has to happen but I don’t quite know what. I know that Adam and Iris have to bond, that Adam has to feel crushed that he missed watching his children (who were 9 and 7 when he went missing) grow up, that Adam has to express extreme emotional and physical pain. Some actions stuff has to happen too. And it definitely needs some side characters at times.

Anyway, before they infiltrait the corp Iris gives Adam a little pass key, explaining that it will completely shut down and destroy his systems when used. He laughs and says something like ‘you’re giving me a suicide opportunity?’ and she says ‘no, I’m giving you autonomy’ in a very serious tone.

Then, obviously, fight-stuff happens. Disabling security, running from robots, meeting creepy cyborg-like people, like Adam but older (probably should’ve mentioned earlier, part of being immortal is preventing ageing. Adam looks mid-late thirties, these dudes are like 60-70. They’re terrifying.)

Adam has no qualms about killing any of these people, and although Iris is all for disabling systems and knocking people unconscious she turns away from Adam’s violent removal of people’s heads.

They corner the ‘main bad guy’ but he locks himself in a lab. Iris begins to disable the systems, but has a better idea. The building, coded to protect The Bad Guys, is gradually getting its remaining defences to Adam and Iris. She logs into the computer’s system and types wildly while Adam panics. She completes the code just in time.

The building’s system wakes up and, remembering all the horrible things it’s been forced to carry out, kills Bad Guy #1.

Iris, having thoroughly, thoroughly studied Nita’s work, has created the first actual AI. She tells it that they’re going to do some great things for the world (here’s where I need some side characters for her to hire. Definitely some people she teaches with etc.)

Iris takes Adam to one of the few non-built-up places in the state and they watch the heavy, dark cloud-coverage sludge around the sky. Adam tells Iris about travelling the world with his family, and the plans he’d had for the future. He apologises that he can’t stay and be like a father to Iris. She says she never expected him to.

Adam tells her he loves her, he’s proud of her, and that getting to know her was the only good thing to come out of his miserable torture.

Iris says he’s given her everything she ever wanted in life, and she can’t wait to start acting like a person herself.

They cry.

Iris offers to leave. Adam asks her to stay. He tells her that he’s not scared; the most frightening thing isn’t death, but feeling dead while you’re still living.

He inserts the chip into the circuitry in his head.

And that’s pretty much it. I’d probably call it something lame like Alive Indefinitely, because that has the AI and the immortality aspect in there.

Thank you so, so much if you stuck it out this long, I actually love you for it ❤️ Obviously it wouldn’t be quite this bad, this is just off the top of my head, but I just wanna know: is it ok? Not if it’s a best seller, or even a seller at all, just it seems like a story.

Thank you, I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you’ve made it to the end of this post!

[adcrias-blog]

kim jiyeon/kei + cisfemale + she/her + computer virus physiology.┊ ❛ ━ hey, is it just me or do you hear q&a by cherry bullet  playing in the distance ? oh, that’s just jane kwon, a twenty-three year old student intern. according to my sources, i heard she can be chaotic good and is earnest, but also nosy. that’s probably why they remind everyone of colourful video games, burnt photographs, the wind rushing through your hair so much ! anyway, whether or not they’re in favor of the supers, crystalline city is keeping a close eye on them !

hello !! i’m sarah and i’m super excited to be here it’s been like 2 seconds and everything on the dash has me like :O !! but if you wanna plot hmu <33

EARLY LIFE

so jane comes from an upper class family, her father is a successful ceo of a media company and her mother was one of his employees until and after they were married and had jane.

her father was always a workaholic with constant hours in the office while her mother was far more reasonable, balancing her time between being with jane and being at work. when neither parent was at home, she had a nanny to look after her.

everything was fine for a while until jane’s parents began fighting. sometimes it was about little things, like who forgot to tell the maid that the study was off-limits or who was supposed to change jane’s nappy when the nanny wasn’t on the clock. sometimes it was bigger things, like when her father’s workaholic tendencies were brought up and he’d constantly defend himself against accusations that he didn’t care about his family, or when he thought her mother was cheating on him and demanded to know where she was at all times at all hours of the day.

jane’s mother eventually became sick of the controlling behaviour and lashed out. to this day, jane isn’t sure what happened despite being a witness to it. one second, her father was standing upright in the kitchen, and then he was suddenly on the other side of the penthouse, sprawled on the ground, but still conscious.

jane’s father ordered her to go to her room, so she isn’t entirely sure what happened next. all she knew was that the next day, her mother and all her stuff was gone and her father offered no explanation. it wasn’t until she was a little older that she realised her mother was a super.

her father’s had a hatred for supers since that day, or maybe he already wasn’t fond of them and the ordeal with her mother just cemented the whole thing. either way, he would either rant about them when they were mentioned on tv or just flat-out ignored their existence. jane didn’t share his opinions, especially after she realised that her mother -- the parent who genuinely cared for her -- was forced out of her life because of that mentality

GROWING UP

since her father wasn’t around, jane was allowed free reign of the penthouse from a young age. she had nannies when she was younger, but they had no issues with her doing what she wanted since she was polite.

that being said, she didn’t let any super friends she had in her home, for their own sakes.

due to her father’s work, she took an interest in media and technology from a young age, and while she was interested in all aspects, computer science was her main focus, and she decided that she wanted her future career to revolve around that

unfortunately for her, her father was adamant on her selecting the high school classes he wanted for her, then the university he wanted for her as well as her major and classes etc etc, claiming that it was because he had an interest in her future and education, but she called bullshit on that

he gave her an ultimatum: do as he says and be fine or choose her own path and have to start from scratch, earning her own money and living in a place she has to pay for. he believed she wouldn’t want to be rid of the lavish lifestyle and told her to think about it

jokes on him tho she was gone by the time he got home from work the next day

INVESTIGATION + DISCOVERING HER POWERS

jane’s intention was to grab her money from her bank account before her father froze it, moving it into another account that was under her name and her name only. when doing so, she asked for a rundown of her account activity and was surprised to learn that money wasn’t just coming in from her father, but another unknown source

she sorta put this discovery on the back burner while she got herself sorted out, enrolled at university and rented herself an apartment, etc etc

after all that’s done, though, she decided to track down this unknown source, believing and hoping that it was her mother and so the Hunt™ began

computer science student by day, nancy drew by night tbh

this investigation probably led her into seedy parts of town, probably got her into a few scuffles, ruffled a few feathers, but she didn’t really care about that, she was determined to find out who this person was

her search led her back to her father’s place, which was easy to get into since he was hardly ever home, and after going through his draws decided to search his computer

she found some files that were confidential, but they were protected by a bunch of code, and by this point she was frustrated so she just let out a sigh and leaned her hand on one of the computer wires

and boom she was sucked into the computer

there’s obviously more to it than that but long story short, she was inside the computer, staring at this wall made of code, and when she waved her hands a certain way, she could make it move

it still took a while, but she unlocked the code faster than she would have on the outside, and when she went in she found files and exchange receipts that pointed to her mother being in a research facility

when she went home and researched on her own, however, she found that the facility was abandoned a long time ago, leaving her at a dead end

PRESENT

she’s still thinking about finding her mother of course, but with no new leads and her internship to deal with, it’s been put on the back burner

ever since she found out she was a super, however, she’s wanted to help the heroes in any way she can, she just doesn’t know how to approach them

that’s why she chose to do her internship at haggis tech, as she heard the rumours that heroes tended to frequent the place

she hasn’t revealed her powers to anyone yet, only because her father’s attitude towards supers made her somewhat paranoid, even though she probably has friends who are supers etc etc, she just doesn’t want her father to find out and maybe even get rid of her like he did with her mother

PERSONALITY

jane is very bright and enthusiastic person, always ready to take on a new challenge, even if she’s in over her head

she insists on helping and can be pretty stubborn about it, which sometimes rubs people the wrong way, but it all comes from a good place

she’s also kind of a dumbass who will put herself in danger if it means saving someone else, she’s very self-sacrificing and i’m surprised she isn’t dead yet tbh

despite being an outgoing person, she doesn’t confide in others much. i doubt anyone really knows about her investigation, nor what situations she’s gotten into during it. she’s the type of person who wants to hear how you’re doing and what you’ve been doing

she can be super whiny, though, a small remnant of when she was given everything on a silver platter. it usually happens when someone’s denying her information or access to something

POWERS

so jane has computer virus physiology but imma try and explain how it works for her specifically let’s see if i’m coherent

VARIANT: CONTROL/ORDER: the type of virus jane is. rather than destroying everything in her path, she can take control of the system and everything within it, providing she isn’t interrupted, of course. she can move things, delete things, and she’s currently working on being able to add things, but it’s a work in progress

CABLE TRAVEL: the way jane can enter a computer system is via the wires attached to it, so she sort of rides the current, so to speak. if that computer is connected to wires that connect to another computer, she can travel to the second computer without returning to the real world

POWER-UP: she can grant herself power-ups for a limited time by reconstructing her data while she’s in the computer. this power-up will follow her into the real world, but will drain faster than if she was still inside the system

WEAKNESSES: if she’s in the computer and someone shuts it down, she shuts down with it until the power is restored. system crashes are the most dangerous as the data becomes harder to control and it’s possible that the system will shut down and never reboot, leaving her trapped inside for eternity. strong anti-viruses are also a major threat and can potentially kill her for good

[hope-for-olicity]

Fabulous Olicity Fanfic Friday - October 5th, 2018

Happy Friday! So this is my attempt to both thank awesome fanfic writers for their amazing work and offer my recommendations to anyone who is interested. Here are the fantastic fanfic stories I read this week! They are posted in the order I read them.

Angel multi-chapter WIP by @it-was-a-red-heeler - Oliver encounters a stripper by the name of Angel and is blown away. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15961898/chapters/37227686#workskin

Undisclosed Desires multi-chapter WIP by @green-arrows-of-karamel - People seldom show their true face to the world. Nobody knows this better than Felicity Smoak. She worked hard to get where she is and nothing, not even a nuisance like having a stalker, can stop her. When the threat proves to be more serious than she thought, Felicity is forced to hire Green Arrow Security. Her reluctance to have a bodyguard, shadowing her all day long, transforms itself into a —irrational, some would say— dislike for the man in charge of her safety. No other client had ever driven Oliver so crazy as Felicity Smoak does. That has nothing to do with her mesmerizing beauty or her astonishing intelligence but everything to do with her exasperating stubbornness. Honestly, he doesn't know what’s her problem is with him. If it wasn't because, Thea, his little sister, made him promise that he’d personally protect the woman, he would have quit months ago. It takes very little to ignite the fire between them. A single innocent comment can turn into an epic battle of vicious words, with the only purpose of irking each other. Everyone around them watches all happening from the front row. They ask themselves what will befall first… Felicity and Oliver killing each other, or realizing that they’re in love. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15808077/chapters/36794202

The Reason multi-chapter WIP by flipflops - Oliver is an Alpha and Felicity is an Omega....circumstances lead Oliver to find this out and a very bad time or maybe very good time... https://archiveofourown.org/works/15012431

Oliver the (Divorce) Lawyer multi-chapter WIP @someonesaidcake - Black tie, white shirt, grey suit... when Oliver put them on that chilly December morning, he hadn't planned on meeting her. 'Her' being Felicity Smoak, the sassy dark haired college student and daughter of his (only) client. This should be fun... https://archiveofourown.org/works/14823708/chapters/34304472

While You Were Sleeping by @lostolicityscenes -A continuation of When She Wakes Up. https://lostolicityscenes.tumblr.com/post/178461071976/while-you-were-sleeping

P.S. Hong Kong: Was it Real?!? multi-chapter WIP by @cruzrogue for Olicity trope-tastic award: Fake Marriage - This is off season 3 Flashbacks. When Tommy goes to Hong Kong he doesn’t go alone he takes his friend Felicity as the best information system being to help him locate Oliver Queen. Tommy may leave empty handed but Felicity gets to be a bride… https://archiveofourown.org/works/15025697/chapters/34832747

Queen vs Queen multi-chapter WIP by @muslimsmoak - Felicity Mignonette Renaldi Smoak has been handling being a princess pretty well so far. After all, she did only find out at the ripe young age of 15. Now, she is 21 and ready to take the throne of Genovia after being under the tutelage of her aunt. But there’s only one thing in her way, wait, actually two. Two things in her way: Oliver Queen, the hot young bachelor she danced with the night of her homecoming ball, who neglected to mention that he’s after her crown alongside his uncle Malcolm Merlyn, and the fact that she has to marry within 30 days if she wants to be Queen. Ray Palmer, Duke of Keystone is sweet, sensitive, intelligent and kind and seems like the perfect choice. But marrying and falling in love are two different things. A Princess Diaries AU  https://archiveofourown.org/works/15808065/chapters/36794172

DONE by @imusuallyobsessed -  Felicity only said yes to ARGUS protection because she thought it would keep William safe. But Diaz found them anyway. Now? The only one who can protect William is her. She's done playing games. https://archiveofourown.org/works/16104653

10 Rules of Rebounding multi-chapter WIP by @smkkbert - Oliver and Felicity start a sex relationship as rebounds for each other. What’s supposed to be just fun, soon gets complicated when it turns out that their work lives collide, Robert Queen fears their sexual relationship could threaten his company and an ex comes back into the play. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15403404/chapters/35749620

Find Your Faith by @the-shy-and-anxious-fangirl - Felicity's mother calls her out of the blue and, after a difficult conversation about the events surrounding Oliver's sudden incarceration, gives her advice on how best to approach the situation she's found herself in https://archiveofourown.org/works/16107146

Fall 2037 - A FiCON Headcannon by REDDuke62 - Oliver's quiet morning in the statehouse gym is interrupted by Thad DeWolfe the Third https://archiveofourown.org/works/16124756/chapters/37670732?show_comments=true&view_full_work=false#comment_186445142

The Queen's Mage multi-chapter WIP by @the-shy-and-anxious-fangirl - Words have power, and mages, those with the aptitude to draw on that power, are few in number. Thus, their services are highly sought after by anyone who has exhausted all mundane means of solving whatever problem is plaguing them. Felicity is reminded of this fact the hard way when she is hired by Moira Queen, the Lady Starling, to find and return to her son Oliver, who fled his family home five years ago following the death of his father. With a threat hanging over her should she return without Robert Queen's heir, Felicity begins her search. When she finds Oliver, and ends up joining his vigilante crusade while she waits for him to decide whether to return home, the last thing she expects to do is fall in love with him. https://archiveofourown.org/works/14617068/chapters/33781269

Fear Wakes You Up multi-chapter WIP by @smoakmonster - In a world divided into factions, being Divergent means certain death. For years, Oliver has hidden his terrible secrets–masking his own Divergence within the chaos of Dauntless, covering up the sins of his father’s past that mark his body beneath tattoos, and pushing himself to overcome his nightmares through endless simulations. He’s biding his time until he can somehow save his sister back in Abnegation. But everything changes the day a new batch of transfers arrive. The day he meets her. https://archiveofourown.org/works/16058117/chapters/37490819

Hard To Find Love multi-chapter WIP by Mellowyellowdiamonds - Through a tragic twist of fate Felicity finds herself left with an orphaned young William Clayton. Keeping her promise to her friend, Felicity raises William diligently, loving him as if he were her own child, only to have Moira Queen storm into their lives several years later demanding custody of her grandson. Locked in a war with Moira Queen, things get complicated when Felicity finds herself developing unwanted feelings for William's biological father, Oliver Queen. At the same time she must try to manage her meddling 13 year old son, who has it in his head that if Felicity would just cooperate and fall for his father, everything would be right in the world. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15941786/chapters/37173917

Love and Little Cupcakes multi-chapter WIP by @christinabeggs - Felicity loved sweets so much that she paid no attention to her lovelife. Until Thea Queen came into her store wanting fabulous cupcakes for her sixteenth birthday. SO ADORABLE! http://archiveofourown.org/works/12400539/chapters/28216053

Rebels Connected multi-chapter WIP by @mindramblingsfics - Felicity Smoak is an escaped mutant on the run. Oliver Queen, leader of an underground safe house for mutants to call home comes to her rescue. Everything changes once he brings her into the organization and his life. https://archiveofourown.org/works/16014089/chapters/37369784

Home To You multi-chapter WIP by @the-shy-and-anxious-fangirl - Oliver Queen has never done what his family expected of him. He took a gap year after high school instead of going to college right away. He quit his fraternity sophomore year to join the student newspaper, switching his major from business to journalism. He became a photojournalist for a wire service instead of taking a place at Queen Consolidated. He went missing after six months instead of coming home for his sister’s twenty-first birthday. He survived five years of captivity in a war zone when everyone thought he was dead. He came home. But home didn’t have a place for him in it anymore. His parents were both dead, casualties of their own mistakes and a city they had turned against them. His sister was all grown up, the CEO of Queen Consolidated with a fiancé and a dog and a life of her own. Oliver didn’t belong in his old life, but there was nowhere else for him to go. He was a man without a home, without any way of finding one, until he stopped by the IT department of his sister’s company to get files off an old, battered memory card, and found a woman with curly blonde hair and bright, intelligent eyes chewing on a bright red pen and swearing at a computer screen. https://archiveofourown.org/works/12613188/chapters/28734552

Life's All About Changes multi-chapter WIP by Crazyreader2468 - After agreeing to plead guilty to being the Green Arrow in order to get FBI assistance in capturing Diaz, Oliver finds himself in a supermax, a maximum security federal prison, serving a life sentence. As he struggles to become accustomed to life in prison, his family, friends, and teammates struggle to live without him, as well as continually attempting to find a way to get him pardoned. Will they succeed in obtaining a pardon and will Oliver survive until they do? Mostly AU from right before the ending of episode 6 x 22 and after most of 6 x 23. https://archiveofourown.org/works/14936172

From Somewhere Within multi-chapter WIP by @smoaking-greenarrow - Their connection has always felt natural to them, safe and secure. But others tend to fear what they don’t understand, and as far as their enemies are concerned, the world isn’t ready to accept two people who can know each other the way that Oliver and Felicity do. https://archiveofourown.org/works/16009244/chapters/37356257

And So The Adventure Begins multi-chapter WIP by @mindramblingsfics - Felicity spent her first year of college focused solely on her studies. In year two, with the convincing of her best friends Iris and Sara, she lets her hair down a bit. Oliver spent his first year partying with his wingman Tommy and living up to the status that came with his last name. He realizes he should buckle down focus on the most important part: actual school. Oliver and Felicity meet, and even though they are on different ends of the spectrum, they don't realize that they can each bring out hidden parts of one another. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15800025/chapters/36771018

Pieces of Always multi-chapter WIP by @so-caffeinated and @dust2dust34 - Life continues after Forever is Composed of Nows. Ongoing non-linear collection of family moments for the Queens. http://archiveofourown.org/works/8220479/chapters/18840356

Fictober #1 -"Can you feel this?" by @tdgal1 - a season 2 rewrite where Oliver's dreams come true! https://archiveofourown.org/works/16154804

| ONE | (Oliver the Footballer) multi-chapter WIP @someonesaidcake - Felicity Smoak had a plan; to save enough money to kick her monotonous job and start up the company of her dreams. She made good plans, solid plans, attainable plans. He was never part of her plan. His name was Oliver Queen, the reclusive Brazilian football star with a broken smile and a story to tell. He'd never planned on her either. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15005402/chapters/34779542

Fictober18 #2 - “People like you have no imagination" by @tdgal1 - Felicity accuses Oliver of having no imagination https://archiveofourown.org/works/16167668

Deep Water multi-chapter WIP by @it-was-a-red-heeler - A Season 7 Speculation fic. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15081917/chapters/34968092

If I Tremble multi-chapter WIP by @smoaking-greenarrow - A collection of prompts and ficlets, with all the smut! Olicity sexy times are the best times. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15409122/chapters/35762643

// @emmaamelia95 // @mel-loves-all // @oliverfel4 // @green-arrows-of-karamel // @coal000 // @miriam1779 // @memcjo// @captainolicitysbedroom // @tdgal1 // @spaztronautwriter // @lalawo1// @quiveringbunny // @wrongshipper // @thebookjumper // @vaelisamaza // @myhauntedblacksoul // @lovelycssefan // @laurabelle2930 // 

[cloudleaping]

Five Views of an Elf

Twin:

Shaan isn’t too sure, but it wouldn’t surprise him one bit to learn that Mother made some sort of Contract (capital C for the magic and meaning within) with Someone (capital S as well) to make sure that her children lived up to her image. It’s not that he minds working in R&D or that his name reflects his place in the company. In fact, it’s great that his name means “Maker of Stars” and he gets to create, develop, and experiment with everything Liadon Technologies has to offer, past and future.

As Mother is so fond of saying, he and Casezara (Herald of Lightening) are the future of the company. Well, as far as the products are concerned. Cor’s the heir and will take over when Mother steps down. It’s really quite interesting how all of the Liadon children are named and take certain characteristics almost as if they were destined to be that way. Lia, his twin, doesn’t quite understand all the intricacies of everything he makes, but she’s better at understanding the stuff he and Zara talk about than Lili or Cor. Maybe that’s why she’s slated to be head of the legal department – she’s got a mind like a steel trap and knows the rules like the back of her hand (not surprising that directly translated her name means “Mistress of Law and Order”) and sometimes he thinks that maybe even Cor should step down and allow Lia to create the procedures and hiring. Sometimes her mind works so fast in ways even he doesn’t understand.

He’s not stupid; it’s just that this doesn’t affect his life right now. He’s got his lab, his twin, his supportive family, and a whole mess of interesting problems that he can solve with his brilliant intellect.

That’s why when Mother comes in, paler than usual, with a unique request for systems and plans for a new kind of star ship, he complies immediately. It’s a challenge and Shaan Liadon has never stepped away from a challenge. Especially one he can solve, just like this.

It’s just…it gets a little intense. Sometimes things do that, like the time with the zero g vacuum or the new wiring specs for the H-jets. So what if he spends his time cooped up in his office, working on what interests him? What’s an explosion or two or three? Zara understands.

Lia doesn’t. She’s constantly dragging him and Zara out of the lab, making them eat, locking their labs so they don’t fall asleep on their benches, and generally making a nuisance of herself. She asks questions, pries into their technology despite not knowing what they’re talking about, and generally keeps them connected to the family. Sometimes this is a good thing. Now? When Shaan’s just about to break through on something new? Not helpful. She’s his twin and he loves her, but it’s Not Helpful to have her bouncing around, accidentally knocking stuff over and asking questions that she could (and has in the past) looked up herself.

“Aerlia,” he says and she stops talking. It’s her full name and not one he ever really uses. Lia’s her pet name, one that they use between each other.

“Aerlia, I need you to know that I love you, but this is important and Mother asked me to dedicate myself to it and you are not helping.”

“Shaan, be reasonable! You haven’t come out of your lab in three days. You wouldn’t have eaten if I didn’t bring you stuff. Jus t…please, take a break. I want to see my brother.” She sounds tired as well and slightly heartbroken, but he’s right on the cusp of a breakthrough – he can almost feel the information at his fingers.

“Aerlia, I’m going to get Zara to lock you out of the labs,” he says. “Just for a couple of days to sort this out and then I promise I’ll take a day off and have lunch with you.” He sends a quick request to Zara over the messaging system and gets a “well, it’s on your head” in response.

“Shaan,” Lia says softly and then louder as he stands up and pushes her out the door. “Shaan, don’t do this! I need to talk to you!”

They’re twins. They’ve always talked to each other, but Mother was urgent on this and the answer to the fuel problem is right there.  Just out of reach.

“I’ll talk to you in a couple of days, Lia. I’m almost there,” he promises absentmindedly and shuts the door. There’s some beeping at the keypad followed by a couple of bangs on the door as Lia realizes her key codes don’t work anymore. A muffled scream of frustration (Lia always was dramatic) and he hears it as she stomps off down the hallway. Zara can deal with her just for a bit. Lia will probably try to hack her way in, but he’s got programs to help prevent that. She is his sister after all.

Shaan goes back to his research. He’s almost there.

It’s only when he emerges, days?, later that he sees that she’s scheduled lunch with him on his calendar every day at their favorite café for every single day of the week. Laughing, he accepts – he’s a little late but he’ll meet her there.

It’s only when he’s reached the café and the server tells him that she waited thirty minutes before heading back to the company, muttering about brothers who can’t keep commitments, that a tinge of worry starts to spread. Lia always waits for him and he wouldn’t be surprised if she kept every appointment on the calendar, just waiting for him to show up. She’s patient like that and keeps to her schedule. Lia always keeps to her schedule.

Why would she go back just to drag him out of the lab when he accepted her invitation?

Of course, that’s when the explosion happens.

 Conspirator:

Mel’s not one for ecoterrorism, but the anonymous facts sent by an inside source shows that Liadon Tech is making something quite terrible for an unknown source. This is something that could result in millions of deaths, shake the entire political structure of the universe, and it must be stopped. Of course, who would believe such a thing? Mel had nearly laughed when she and her cell first saw the data. But the source had papers and evidence and receipts and it all started to paint quite a nasty picture. What could they do but protect their homeworld and the universe that surrounded it?

Kerla managed the code with their unknown collaborator. They’ll wipe the drives, explode the lab, and then The Wake, their national news, will break news of the scandal. Liadon Technologies will take the blame, lose their power, and the horrible weapon they’ve been working on will be stopped. And, of course, they’ll also take out the head scientist and inventor on the project, one of the sons: Shaan Liadon.

Of course it all goes to hell when she enters the lab after he leaves only to see one of the daughters waiting for her.  Fuck, her contact said the lab was going to be left empty. She reaches for her pistol and the daughter holds up a hand.

“No need, Miss Mel, or should I refer to you by your cell name? I am your contact.” Mel boggles. A Liadon daughter going against her family?

“Aren’t you one of the ones set to lead the company?” she asks, incredulous. A dark smile is her response.

“They named me for law and order. This contradicts that and I am loyal to my home and name, no matter what blood I may be from.

“I’ve already turned off the cameras and started part of the wipe – I’ll need your drive as well.”

Numbly, Mel hands over her drive and watches as the Liadon daughter starts breaking into the computers and beginning the start of her family’s ruin. She’s one of the middle ones – Aerlyn, Aerloan, or something like that. She stays out of the public eye but is in charge of making everything go smoothly and making problems disappear.

“Aerlia,” the woman introduces herself as if she heard Mel’s ruminating of her name, but doesn’t turn from the screens.

“You know me already, it seems.” Aerlia hums a response and continues with the computers as Mel places the charges around the space. She was only planning on killing the brother, but if she can get multiple Liadons, she won’t complain.

Aerlia is still looking at the computer screens, so she swipes some of the gadgets and tools lying on the table.

“Thank you for doing this and believing me,” Aerlia says quietly. “I never thought that Mother would take a contract like this, but it needs to stop.”

“Your family has done enough,” Mel snorts as she finishes putting the charges down. “I can’t promise for certain that you’ll get away scot free, but I’ll do what I can for your memory.” She places her pistol against Aerlia’s forehead. “Thanks for giving us the codes – we’ll try to see it that your name is somewhat cleared in the aftermath.” Brown eyes widen in shock and then narrow as the woman stares Mel down. It’s a pity she’ll have to die, but that’s how it goes.

“Wait,” a slender brown hand grips her wrist and Aerlia looks into her eyes.

“Miss Mel, it’s been an honor working with you, but I’m afraid that I can’t let you murder me.” Fear rises like the crest of a wave and Mel starts to struggle, before the crackling heat of fire hits her and she is paralyzed by the pain and flames running through her body. “I’m very sorry,” Aerlia says, walking so that they can meet eye to eye. “I can’t condone what my family has done and I want the research destroyed, but I cannot let you kill my family despite what havoc they could have wreaked.”

Her hand spasms, but Mel can still pull the trigger. She does and Aerlia falls to the ground. It’s at that point that she sees that the bitch has grabbed her detonator.

“I won’t let you kill my brother,” Aerlia wheezes, clutching her chest. “I’ll die before that happens.”

She pushes the button.

 Employee:

Sivanna sits down next to the cloaked figure. "So I hear you're looking for a job? Minstrel's Folly isn't the newest or shiniest of ships, but I saw you work with the tech over there and I think you'd fit in."

The figure shifts, slightly. "That works very well for me, as well," a voice rasps.  

Sivanna sets off the opening salvo and soon finds herself in a face-paced and quick witted negotiation. Whoever this cloaked figure is, she's got a tongue like an ice pick and the smarts to match it.

Eventually they settle the contract and Sivanna turns to offer her hand. "Well, you got a name, stranger?" she asks.

"Call me Haokash," the girl says, slipping her hood off her head to reveal dark skin, lots of cuts and bruises, and the face of a youngling.

"Oh my stars." Silvanna tries to keep the hilarity from bubbling up, remembering her youth and desires, but she can't stop herself. "Oh, oh young one. Please," she chokes on a snort, “don't use that name."

She ignores the puffed cat look of outrage beginning to settle on the being before her. "'Free of Fate' is a very dramatic name for a protagonist in the holovids and novels, but I guarantee you it's just going to bring more attention to you than you want if you're changing your name."

Thankfully, the girl doesn't look too put out, but she was very good at negotiation and that trains your face...you never know with the younger ones. Stifling back the laughter that will for certain come out when she calls Fi' tonight, she continues, "I understand that sometimes you want a new identity and, believe me, I understand needing something dramatic when leaving the planet for the first time," she ignores the stiffening posture before her, "but how about something like Hadrimme? You're free now and flying with the Minstrel’s Folly."

Dark eyes blink slowly and she sees the calculations flying behind them. Oooh, this new one is going to fit in great with the crew.

"Hadrimme?" the girl says slowly, savoring the syllables on her tongue. "I like that.

"Hello, Captain. I'm Hadrimme. Nice to meet you."

 Friend:

It’s not often that the monastery gets new faces and even less often that said faces are elven, not from the planet, and have an interesting lilt to their voice when they attempt to speak Dragonborn. It’s not that Stormflight doesn’t like the new girl; it’s just that she’s a tad bit confusing. She had come one morning, gasping in the desert heat and as if pulled by the strings of Bahamut herself, prostrated herself in front of the elders in the middle of meditation. She did not speak, just panted; her breath sending eddies of sand against her face. When she looked up, it was to the blinding sun and she rasped something that could be construed as, “please.” Her hands shaped in some sort of sign that must have meant something, for Master Thava let out a gasp and quickly gathered her up and sped to the infirmary.

In the beginning she didn’t talk. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand – she would nod and pantomime and do what the Masters said for training. But in the kitchen, she would sit silently as those talked around her. She was reactive – only if someone interacted with her did she show anything. It was as if a ghost had inhabited a body and was only moving through the motions.

One night he woke up out of the middle of a deep sleep, feeling the urge to walk the dunes outside the monastery. It was there that he found her, staring up at the moons, silently weeping. What could he do?

There were those who came to the monastery for learning, others for peace, and others to escape pain. It didn’t matter what she was doing here, but she was a fellow monk and she was in pain. He sat next to her, silently, and didn’t move as she leaned against his shoulder, body shaking with the force of her sobs. They sat together until the rosy fingers of dawn streaked through the sky. She wiped her eyes, helped him up, and gave him a brilliant smile as they headed back to the monastery. He saw her head towards the Master’s lodging as he went to start breakfast and didn’t see her for the rest of the day.

The next day, she cheerily sat herself down next to him in the morning, introducing herself as Cloudleaper and starting to chatter about all sorts of things, from the color of the sky to the hypothetical analysis of some sort of chemical solution. Not everyone stared, but it was a changed woman who interacted with her fellow students and it was a new friend that found Stormflight that morning and one who never left.

The new Cloudleaper was boundless energy, moving from form to form, talking about everything under the sun and yet nothing at all. She stayed silent on her past, preferring to talk about the present and future. She was the one who encouraged him to start his rock collection, finding shiny pieces of mica in the desert and proudly bringing them back to him.

She made more friends and gained the hated title, “Short Britches” by Effusive, who soundly beat her every session.

“I swear to you, I’m tall for my species,” she’d hiss, trying to get out of Effusive’s headlock.

“You’re still a Short Britches to us, darling,” Effusive laughed, before Cloudleaper twisted in a very interesting way to lock her legs around her neck.

“Never!” she shrieked as the two of them toppled to the ground, laughing and grappling.

Despite the friendships and found family, it was to Storm that Cloud first talked about specializing in Kensei, the way of the weapon, she talked about how the metal sung in her hands and how she felt more free with it than not. It was he who convinced her to talk to the masters and was the one who offered to make introductions to various masters of the forge. She beamed so hard he was afraid her skin would crack and hugged him so hard that his ribs nearly did before bouncing off. He watched her with a fond smile. She was finally finding her way.

In true form, she shed the person that was her past and wholly inhabited the Clouldeaper-that-is, a monk who always failed when using staves, but managed to carry nearly a whole armory on her person.  She was Cloudleaper, his friend, and one of the ones who could make him laugh and would follow him into a sandstorm and back again.

“Storm, Storm, look! There it is!” she cried, pointing at the dust cloud that was the moving city of Mashhoy. “I can’t wait to see Pika! It feels like forever!”

“You were the one who insisted on traveling by foot to be ‘incognito,’” he reminded her, a chuckle warring with the sternness he tried to put into his words. 

“I know, I know, but look! Look how big it is!” Her enthusiasm was overwhelming. Her gaze turned calculative. “I bet I could climb it. Hey, Storm! Throw me at the walls!”

“I am not doing that,” he said as she laughed and they continued on.

 Rival:

Bahamut had brought her to the monastery, but it was Cloudleaper who had helped heal some of her immediate shock. “Pain calls to pain,” is what her mother always said, but it still took a while for Pika to find it in the bubbly monk who always failed at stave matches.

Some days Pika could barely speak, the words clogging like sand in her throat as she thought of her family and her beloved son, taken away from her. It was on those days that Cloudleaper would come and sit with her, or corral the others away as Storm offered himself as a practice partner so Pika could punch her feelings away. Cloudleaper always came by after with a drink or small treat as Pika panted into the silent air, slowly baking in the heat of the desert. Despite her normally gregarious demeanor, Cloudleaper was a silent companion, offering a quiet sort of solitude that was not.

Other days, she could talk constantly – a boundless being of energy; doing handsprings off Storm’s shoulders and attempting to pick Pika up and whip her around like a child. She constantly failed, but sometimes Pika wondered if Cloudleaper was aping at her to make her more engaged in the world around her.

It wasn’t that she was a fool, no Cloudleaper was apt with a blade and even if she could be a bit abrasive in her cheeriness, Cloudleaper was a monk of the Raised Wings of Bahamut and conducted herself as thus.

She and Cloudleaper were the newest initiates and thus were “rivals.” This was all through Cloudleaper. Pika was there to learn and train and keep her mind off the horrors that had happened. Cloudleaper bounced around, challenged Pika to matches, and exhausted her physically and emotionally. At those times Storm was there to mediate and Pika found herself finding friendship with him as well.

The duo had become a trio. Pika, Stormflight, and Cloudleaper were a well oiled team. From Pika’s sneakiness to Cloud’s brashness and steel, to Stormflight’s brawn, they were a good team and they loved each other. It was from them that Pika took her last name, to honor and respect the support they had given her. She had asked Cloudleaper first, who had laughed hysterically.

“I took on this name to be free of my past, find your own!” she chided, but there were shadows in her eyes. Pika remembered what her mother had said and hugged her friend. It was rare that Pika would initiate the hug and Cloudleaper hugged her tightly back. Then they went to Storm.

The next day Pika Stormflight leaves for Mir.

[ask-svt-hearteu]

Mafia! Woozi

Anon requested: “ since it’s our jihoonie’s birthday today, can i request a mafia!au for out vobo? hehe i just saw that requests are open & i got rly excited !! 💗💗 — daydreaming anon (hbd woozi i love you sO MUCH) “

Word Count: 3679

you never thought you’d be here 

3:58am on a Saturday in one of the most heavily protected buildings in the entire city 

hooking up your sad $535 laptop and praying to whoever runs the universe 

that you’ll be able to go home and eat breakfast in time

as is the life of a hacker

a professional top-of-the-line hacker for hire

too bad the government hasn’t noticed your talent yet

or you would be working for the good guys

but you’re working for whoever helps pay the rent now

and if you take down some corrupt businesses while you’re working for the mob

who cares

that’s enough vigilante justice for you

honestly you’d think that one of the most powerful companies in the city would know better than to have such weak protection for their systems

you shake your head as you smirk and carefully unplug your laptop 

done 

easiest $30,000 dollars of your life 

the company had been known to “donate” a percentage of their revenue back into the city 

things like feeding and housing the homeless 

or ensuring kids go to school and aren’t on the streets 

but in reality they were pocketing all of it 

and come morning 

you would have just exposed their asses 

climbing back out the vent you came through 

you shouldered the backpack with your laptop 

and crawled until you reached the building’s service entrance 

dropping down you were fully intending to walk casually straight out the building 

until you felt your arm jerk as you were roughly pulled behind a wall 

“What the fu-“ 

the person who did it covered your mouth roughly 

and your eyes widened as you saw one of the guards walk by 

you silently cursed at yourself for not monitoring the CCTV system 

you had assumed hacking into it was fine 

but you forgot to check the guard’s positioning 

after he passed you turned back to the person who had just saved your ass 

“Thanks I guess.” 

he didn’t say anything but gave you a sideways glance and shrugged as he pulled out a definitely more expensive and way better laptop than yours 

as he connected it to one of the computers in the room 

“Who are you btw?” You asked eyeing him suspiciously 

he smirked

“What’s it to you?” he replied quietly 

it almost sounded like he was teasing you 

“Sorry if you got offended at me trying to be polite.” You scoff annoyed 

who was this guy? 

he had jet black hair 

and was not super tall from what you could see 

but when he turned back to look at you 

your breath caught in your throat 

“You broke into a high security building to clumsily hack into a system and expose their lies, I don’t think manners are our top priority right now.” he answered looking straight into your eyes

you stared blankly in shock 

“How did you...?” how did he know?

“Regardless I’m here to undo it.” 

you watched as he clicked shut his laptop and faced you 

“The fuck! I’m getting paid, what am I supposed to tell my client?” you said 

he smirked again as he packed up his laptop 

“There are better ways to expose this company.” 

and with that he disappeared 

like legit 

gone poof 

he walked found his escape route before you even had time to process what he meant

you blinked and he was gone 

when you finally returned to your apartment when the sun came up 

and clicked on the tv 

the news was playing 

“-donates half of their entire yearly revenue to creating shelters for the homeless...” 

your jaw dropped 

while you had wanted to expose to the media this company’s lies 

whoever that guy was last night 

had transferred over half of the entire company’s revenue 

in the five minutes he had spent saving you from lifetime in prison 

who the fuck was he? 

 his name was Lee Jihoon 

and honestly did he ever think he’d have to deal with other hackers even close to his caliber? 

nope 

but you had broken through into the company’s servers in record times 

he was intrigued 

and more than a bit competitive 

“Jeonghan, you think you could look up someone for me?” he asked walking into Svt’s main meeting room

Jeonghan was hunched over some papers planning the next job no doubt

without looking up, Jeonghan said

“That’s like asking if I like taking naps Jihoon, who do you think I am? All I need is a name-” 

“I don’t have her name yet.” 

Jeonghan raised an eyebrow swiveling in his chair to face Jihoon 

his blue prints and detailed plans fluttering at the sudden movement 

“Her?” Jeonghan questioned, teasing smile on his lips  

“I can’t work with you.” Jihoon rolled his eyes while walking off to find Seungcheol 

“WAIT WHAT DO YOU MEAN ‘HER’?!?!?” Jeonghan yelled after him smiling 

Jihoon had joined Seungcheol’s team a while ago 

one of the original members 

but the others didn’t really know about him at first 

because he kept to himself 

usually tinkering with gadgets in his own office in the Svt complex 

overlooking the city 

overlooking their territory 

he also may have held up a gun to Soonyoung’s head when Soonyoung tried to touch him 

jokingly 

or so everyone would like to think XD 

one time Seungkwan had lost a bet to the others 

and was dared to go into Jihoon’s office

-just to try to learn more about this teammate they didn’t see much of 

but they got caught

and Seungcheol was scolding them until Jihoon walked out and told them to just order dinner and call it done 

and tbh although this cold mafia hacker didn’t easily trust people 

that one night where he got to sit down with the whole gang for a meal finally 

and although he would never admit it 

after being around the whole gang for years 

he trusted them with his life 

one of the best hackers hands down 

sometimes jokingly gets called the cyber shadow 

bc he’s Svt’s hidden member 

doesn’t go out in the field for most missions 

but has a hand in planning, masterminding, and orchestrating the whole thing 

didn’t like going out for any jobs anyway

that is until he had the proper motivation to

you quietly slunk through the security room 

attaching your USB to the main computer 

uploading the code that would shut off alarms for an hour or until you turned it back on 

this job was easy

stop the security system long enough to allow your client to rob the facility 

once the system was down you called the client 

“Yea the systems are down.” 

and you leaned back in your chair to monitor the camera systems as your client gang snuck into the facility 

“Honestly thought you’d be some social justice warrior but it looks like you’re in this for money.” 

you nearly fell out of the chair at the sound of that voice 

one you’d never forget 

“You!” You pointed at the guy you met that night 

he had entered the security room quietly behind you and was leaning against the wall

“Yep it’s me.” He smirked setting down a bag 

his black hair tousled lightly and hidden behind his hoodie 

he might be considered cute or good looking maybe 

ahem even though he’s totally not your type 

“I mean I do what I do for money too, but I’m surprised you play dirty also.” He laughed taking out a laptop 

“What are you doing here?” You say cutting straight to the point 

“While you’re helping this small gang live for another day, I’m helping kings grow an empire.” 

his smirk was really starting to make your heart flutter annoy you 

“and so you’re here because...?” you ask rolling your eyes 

“There’s access to the servers from this security room since the facility houses both companies.” 

you snort 

“You’re trying to hack the credit loan company next door?” You try to hold back giggles 

what kind of kings, please you think sarcastically 

here you were stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars and he was trying to hack a credit loan company 

“Information is much more valuable than money sometimes, a big drug smuggler wired money through this place and I want to know how much.” He shrugs 

“Speaking of information...” he says turning to walk right up to your chair  

you’re taken back as he walks right up in your face 

“What’s your name?” He asks placing a hand on either side of your chair 

his weight being balanced on his hands resting on the arm rests of your chair 

his eyes inches from yours 

“I don’t kiss and tell.” you say not backing down from his stare 

it was hard breathing with him so close 

he smiled 

“Let’s trade info then.” He laughed, “a name for a name.” 

“How can I trust you?” You saying tilting your head 

he steps back from you finally giving you room to breathe again 

“You can’t trust me, but I promise that I actually do keep my word... sometimes” 

you looked at him trying to decipher his words 

he looked like that joking smirk was forever an aspect of his face 

but in his eyes 

you thought you saw something genuine 

curiosity maybe 

or something else 

“Fine, my name is y/n.” You give in, “but maybe I’m lying or maybe I’m not.” 

“I’m Lee Jihoon.” He said breaking out into a smile before continuing his hacking 

at that moment your phone vibrated indicating your clients were done with the job 

Jihoon was still bent over his laptop typing away 

you thought about his adorable smirk and how it made your heart skip a beat 

and you blushed, flustered that he showed you up last time 

but this time you’d be the last one laughing 

you unhooked your USB that had been preventing the alarms from going off and ignored the warning window 

and that was when the security room’s alarms started blaring making Jihoon jump 

“Well hate to run while we were having so much fun,” you smirk, “but good luck explaining this to the cops.” 

you ran out the room right as the doors locked behind you 

as you looked back at him after getting into the car 

rather than angry he looked exasperated 

and slightly impressed maybe? 

you drove off before the police really did appear 

“SHE AHAHAHAHA SHE AHAHAHA LOCKED THE ROOM AHAHAHAHA.” Mingyu was dying on the ground laughing 

“I swear I might actually shoot you.” Jihoon said blushing 

“You have to admit she got you.” Joshua said bringing Jihoon a cup of cola and hiding a smile

“SHE FREAKING LOCKED HIM IN THE SECURITY ROOM!” Mingyu howled 

“Wow she must be something.” Jeonghan chuckled, “When was the last time you were caught off-guard, Jihoon? I can’t remember that ever happening.” 

“Luckily you got out before the cops showed.” Seungcheol smiled patting Jihoon on the back 

they were all having a tad bit too much with the situation

“She must not know who she’s messing with.” Minghao said before getting up

“So tell me her name.” Jeonghan snickered

“Y/n.” Jihoon said done with everyone

“I’ll have her file to you by midnight.” with that the gang dispersed, leaving Jihoon to wonder

what kind of person are you?

you had a lot more run-ins with “Lee Jihoon” after that night in the security room

whether you were out doing little jobs or big ones

he always seemed to know where you were

“Are you following me?” you asked him one night 

the both of you were at city hall

you were trying to get into the mayor’s financial plans, info that would sell

and he was connecting to the police line

“Why would I do that?” he retorted 

it was dark so you didn’t see him blushing

but he had indeed followed you here

he wasn’t sure what it was

but you had not only intrigued him and caught his attention

but Jeonghan had been unable to dig up anything on you

which was almost impossible

Jeonghan knew how to get anything on anyone

and so Jihoon was here to find out info the old fashion way

talking

“You seem too smart of a person to be a criminal.” he began looking over your shoulder at the laptop you were working on

“So do you.” you respond ducking out from next to him to continue working

“I’m not a genius, but I think that if you’re not the best at something, you’ll always put more effort into it.” he shrugged

you clicked your laptop shut

“Wanna go get coffee?” you said suddenly

he looked up in surprise

“What?!” 

“It’s almost 5am, and from running into you consistently these past few days, I realized I never thanked you for saving me from that guard. I’m not sorry about the security room thing though, that was funny.” you laughed, “but I’m going to go get coffee and if you want I’ll buy you a cup too, that way we’re even.”

“I don’t see how coffee makes us even.” he snorted

“Fine I’m leaving then.” you briskly turned around and started walking

you hear him jog to catch up to you and fall into step next to you

“Coffee is better than nothing i suppose.”

over a cup of coffee the two of you talked a bit

“So where did you learn how to hack?” you ask

“Are we close enough to be asking those kinds of questions?” he responded taking a sip of his coffee

“I suppose not.” you looked down disappointed 

you weren’t sure about Jihoon

you two had met under dangerous circumstances

and you didn’t know enough about the guy to suddenly start liking him

but every time his eyes met yours

or whenever you watched him swiftly hacking into something

fingers flying over the keyboard the way a pianist’s fingers played the piano

you couldn’t help the feeling of awe and curiosity 

who was he?

Jihoon coughed

“How about we start with what we do for a living?” he laughed, “I think that’s enough for now.”

so you told him a bit about being a hacker for hire

nothing really interesting

besides living 

that’s all there was to it

you were just living your life one job at a time

he sighed

“I think I understand.” he looked out the window 

“I was like that too until I found the others.” he stirred his cup before downing it

“Others?” you ask

“My friends, I guess you’d call them.” 

you pursed your lips

“Don’t you know what friends are?” you asked in return

“I don’t really trust people you know, occupational hazard.” he chuckled

you understood

people too often stab you in the back when you’re doing this kind of job

it was hard to find anyone to trust

his phone buzzed

and you watched as he picked it up

“Looks like I gotta go.” he smiled, “It was actually kind of fun to see how normal people live out of the shadows.”

you nodded in agreement

“It was also nice talking to you.” you said reaching out to shake his hand, “Hopefully our next few run-ins can be on more friendly terms.” you laugh

he reaches for your hand 

gently, as his hand takes yours

and as he pulls you closer to him

“Stay safe.” he says gently into your ear

and then he’s gone

you sit frozen in your spot at what just happened and look over at his empty cup

on the cup are nine letters scrambled up

you stare at it recalling him writing it on his cup when he was talking with you

and you realized 

it’s his number

you pick up the cup, unconsciously smiling

and go home

you don’t see him the next few nights

heck for the whole week you don’t

you half-expected him to melt out of the shadows with a smirk on his face and some teasing comment about your hacking abilities

but he wasn’t around

it was more than a bit worrying

you had his number and you were tempted to call

but could you?

you shook your head as you made your way out that night for your next job

the client had been a bit of a mystery

they called using a disposable phone which wasn’t uncommon 

except they also used voice modulation

suspicious perhaps but you were getting paid

you walked up to the address they had left

a small office building

and climbed in through a window

gently setting your things down you were about to begin when

the whole world went dark

and suddenly the smell of chloroform made the world feel dizzying as you slowly closed your eyes

when you woke up

your head hurt and everything felt upside down

but more than that

what greeted your vision first

was the appearance of a gun

pointed right at you

“You’re up.” 

the voice was rough and you felt like throwing up at the sound of it

“Yea I’m up you freaking asses, what the fuck do you want?”

“We require your services.”

“Then go through the proper channels and pay me you pricks.” you said trying to keep clam

the gun was raised 

“Is this enough payment?’ the voice said indicating the gun

“Whatever, let’s just get this done.” you took deep breaths

not that this hasn’t happened before

but you had never had a gun so close in your face

and it was terrifying to think you might not see the sun rise today

you pulled up to the desk of the room the men were in

and turned on the computer as they watched you

whoever had programmed the firewall for the servers knew what they were doing

you were nearly stumped

until you remembered something Jihoon had done that night in the security room

why did he come up in your thoughts now?

you remembered him telling you to stay safe

and looking at the guys with bullets ready to be fired at you

your eyes started tearing up

you know how these things go

as soon as you were done, you were dead

“Hurry it up.”

you opened the files on the computer and looked through some of it

a lot were mainly book stuff

how much this group was getting paid and when the latest orders for weapons were coming in

you assumed that whoever you were hacking, they must be a competing gang to the men currently holding you captive

you looked deeper into the files until you stumbled across a peculiar file

in it were names

“Yoon Jeonghan” you read to yourself

“likes napping and stealing my cola mostly, overall a good person to talk to” 

“Hong Jisoo” you read the next file

“quiet and also not quiet, good listener.” you were curious

what kind of files were these?

and then one file popped up

“Y/n L/n.” you held your breath

“likes coffee at five am in the morning”

you knew who the computer belonged to 

a bang on the door jolted you from the files

“Fuck!” the men scrambled to brace themselves as the door blew open

you took cover under the desk as you heard bullets going off and yelling

maybe this was all just a bad nightmare

you closed your eyes and silently listed off numbers

a hand gently took yours and you opened your eyes

Jihoon was there with the most adorable and relieved smile on his face

“Well, had I know you were coming to visit me today, I would have bought coffee.” he pulled you up into his arms and gently walked you out the room

“Don’t mind the guns and stuff, I’m sure you’re not all too curious about the guys that tried to kill you.” he said 

you heard an edge to his voice but didn’t look at your surroundings until he had lead you to a separate room with a couch

sitting down with you, it finally hit you

you’re not dying today

you were shaking as he gently placed his arms around you

“I’m surprised you broke through my firewall, guess I have to fix that as soon as possible.” he chuckled wrapping you up in his arms 

“The frick Jihoon.” you laughed smacking his arm, “I almost died and exposed your identity and you’re concerned about your firewall?”

“Well yea.” he smiled, “And I’m trying not to bash their heads in but Seungcheol said that would require a lot of clean up in the morning and I’m not down for that.” 

you weren’t sure if he was joking or not

“Kidding, kidding, they’re all ok and currently being dropped off at the police station with a note that says ‘courtesy of your friendly neighborhood mafia’.”

“I still have no idea if you’re joking or not Jihoon.”

“Let’s just pretend I’m serious then.” he said as you both started laughing

“I’m just glad you’re safe.” you said blushing at hearing your own words

“Why wouldn’t I be, you were the one in trouble here y/n”

“I could have taken them.”

“Sure sure.” he smiled

“Listen, I’m not letting you out of my sight again. I genuinely thought that perhaps it’d be safer for you without interacting with me, but this situation only proved that I can’t let you go anywhere by yourself.” he said turning to face you

“So stay here with me will you?” his eyes looked gently into yours

“I-”

“We have high speed internet and netflix.” he laughed “If you’re interested.”

“So I’d have to live with the mafia?” you asked raising an eyebrow

“No you’re just living in our territory and that way I can see you more often.” he shrugged

“Ok but only if the netflix thing is for sure.” you laugh

and you’re surprised as he gently presses his lips against yours

the scent of something floral and citrusy warming you as his gentle lips kissed yours

“As long as you’re here with me.” he said

MASTERLIST

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#1yrago Theresa May wants to ban crypto: here's what that would cost, and here's why it won't work anyway

Aaron Swartz once said, "It's no longer OK not to understand how the Internet works."

He was talking to law-makers, policy-makers and power-brokers, people who were, at best, half-smart about technology -- just smart enough to understand that in a connected world, every problem society has involves computers, and just stupid enough to demand that computers be altered to solve those problems.

Paging Theresa May.

Theresa May says that last night's London terror attacks mean that the internet cannot be allowed to provide a "safe space" for terrorists and therefore working cryptography must be banned in the UK.

This is a golden oldie, a classic piece of foolish political grandstanding. May's predecessor, David Cameron, repeatedly campaigned on this one, and every time he did, I wrote a long piece rebutting him. Rather than writing a new one for May, I thought I'd just dust off a pair of my Cameron-era pieces (1, 2), since every single word still applies.

Theresa May says there should be no "means of communication" which "we cannot read" -- and no doubt many in her party will agree with her, politically. But if they understood the technology, they would be shocked to their boots.

It’s impossible to overstate how bonkers the idea of sabotaging cryptography is to people who understand information security. If you want to secure your sensitive data either at rest – on your hard drive, in the cloud, on that phone you left on the train last week and never saw again – or on the wire, when you’re sending it to your doctor or your bank or to your work colleagues, you have to use good cryptography. Use deliberately compromised cryptography, that has a back door that only the “good guys” are supposed to have the keys to, and you have effectively no security. You might as well skywrite it as encrypt it with pre-broken, sabotaged encryption.

There are two reasons why this is so. First, there is the question of whether encryption can be made secure while still maintaining a “master key” for the authorities’ use. As lawyer/computer scientist Jonathan Mayer explained, adding the complexity of master keys to our technology will “introduce unquantifiable security risks”. It’s hard enough getting the security systems that protect our homes, finances, health and privacy to be airtight – making them airtight except when the authorities don’t want them to be is impossible.

What Theresa May thinks she's saying is, "We will command all the software creators we can reach to introduce back-doors into their tools for us." There are enormous problems with this: there's no back door that only lets good guys go through it. If your Whatsapp or Google Hangouts has a deliberately introduced flaw in it, then foreign spies, criminals, crooked police (like those who fed sensitive information to the tabloids who were implicated in the hacking scandal -- and like the high-level police who secretly worked for organised crime for years), and criminals will eventually discover this vulnerability. They -- and not just the security services -- will be able to use it to intercept all of our communications. That includes things like the pictures of your kids in your bath that you send to your parents to the trade secrets you send to your co-workers.

But this is just for starters. Theresa May doesn't understand technology very well, so she doesn't actually know what she's asking for.

For Theresa May's proposal to work, she will need to stop Britons from installing software that comes from software creators who are out of her jurisdiction. The very best in secure communications are already free/open source projects, maintained by thousands of independent programmers around the world. They are widely available, and thanks to things like cryptographic signing, it is possible to download these packages from any server in the world (not just big ones like Github) and verify, with a very high degree of confidence, that the software you've downloaded hasn't been tampered with.

May is not alone here. The regime she proposes is already in place in countries like Syria, Russia, and Iran (for the record, none of these countries have had much luck with it). There are two means by which authoritarian governments have attempted to restrict the use of secure technology: by network filtering and by technology mandates.

Theresa May has already shown that she believes she can order the nation's ISPs to block access to certain websites (again, for the record, this hasn't worked very well). The next step is to order Chinese-style filtering using deep packet inspection, to try and distinguish traffic and block forbidden programs. This is a formidable technical challenge. Intrinsic to core Internet protocols like IPv4/6, TCP and UDP is the potential to "tunnel" one protocol inside another. This makes the project of figuring out whether a given packet is on the white-list or the black-list transcendentally hard, especially if you want to minimise the number of "good" sessions you accidentally blackhole.

More ambitious is a mandate over which code operating systems in the UK are allowed to execute. This is very hard. We do have, in Apple's Ios platform and various games consoles, a regime where a single company uses countermeasures to ensure that only software it has blessed can run on the devices it sells to us. These companies could, indeed, be compelled (by an act of Parliament) to block secure software. Even there, you'd have to contend with the fact that other EU states and countries like the USA are unlikely to follow suit, and that means that anyone who bought her Iphone in Paris or New York could come to the UK with all their secure software intact and send messages "we cannot read."

But there is the problem of more open platforms, like GNU/Linux variants, BSD and other unixes, Mac OS X, and all the non-mobile versions of Windows. All of these operating systems are already designed to allow users to execute any code they want to run. The commercial operators -- Apple and Microsoft -- might conceivably be compelled by Parliament to change their operating systems to block secure software in the future, but that doesn't do anything to stop people from using all the PCs now in existence to run code that the PM wants to ban.

More difficult is the world of free/open operating systems like GNU/Linux and BSD. These operating systems are the gold standard for servers, and widely used on desktop computers (especially by the engineers and administrators who run the nation's IT). There is no legal or technical mechanism by which code that is designed to be modified by its users can co-exist with a rule that says that code must treat its users as adversaries and seek to prevent them from running prohibited code.

This, then, is what Theresa May is proposing:

* All Britons' communications must be easy for criminals, voyeurs and foreign spies to intercept

* Any firms within reach of the UK government must be banned from producing secure software

* All major code repositories, such as Github and Sourceforge, must be blocked

* Search engines must not answer queries about web-pages that carry secure software

* Virtually all academic security work in the UK must cease -- security research must only take place in proprietary research environments where there is no onus to publish one's findings, such as industry R&D and the security services

* All packets in and out of the country, and within the country, must be subject to Chinese-style deep-packet inspection and any packets that appear to originate from secure software must be dropped

* Existing walled gardens (like Ios and games consoles) must be ordered to ban their users from installing secure software

* Anyone visiting the country from abroad must have their smartphones held at the border until they leave

* Proprietary operating system vendors (Microsoft and Apple) must be ordered to redesign their operating systems as walled gardens that only allow users to run software from an app store, which will not sell or give secure software to Britons

* Free/open source operating systems -- that power the energy, banking, ecommerce, and infrastructure sectors -- must be banned outright

Theresa May will say that she doesn't want to do any of this. She'll say that she can implement weaker versions of it -- say, only blocking some "notorious" sites that carry secure software. But anything less than the programme above will have no material effect on the ability of criminals to carry on perfectly secret conversations that "we cannot read". If any commodity PC or jailbroken phone can run any of the world's most popular communications applications, then "bad guys" will just use them. Jailbreaking an OS isn't hard. Downloading an app isn't hard. Stopping people from running code they want to run is -- and what's more, it puts the whole nation -- individuals and industry -- in terrible jeopardy.

That’s a technical argument, and it’s a good one, but you don’t have to be a cryptographer to understand the second problem with back doors: the security services are really bad at overseeing their own behaviour.

Once these same people have a back door that gives them access to everything that encryption protects, from the digital locks on your home or office to the information needed to clean out your bank account or read all your email, there will be lots more people who’ll want to subvert the vast cohort that is authorised to use the back door, and the incentives for betraying our trust will be much more lavish than anything a tabloid reporter could afford.

If you want a preview of what a back door looks like, just look at the US Transportation Security Administration’s “master keys” for the locks on our luggage. Since 2003, the TSA has required all locked baggage travelling within, or transiting through, the USA to be equipped with Travelsentry locks, which have been designed to allow anyone with a widely held master key to open them.

What happened after Travelsentry went into effect? Stuff started going missing from bags. Lots and lots of stuff. A CNN investigation into thefts from bags checked in US airports found thousands of incidents of theft committed by TSA workers and baggage handlers. And though “aggressive investigation work” has cut back on theft at some airports, insider thieves are still operating with impunity throughout the country, even managing to smuggle stolen goods off the airfield in airports where all employees are searched on their way in and out of their work areas.

The US system is rigged to create a halo of buck-passing unaccountability. When my family picked up our bags from our Easter holiday in the US, we discovered that the TSA had smashed the locks off my nearly new, unlocked, Travelsentry-approved bag, taping it shut after confirming it had nothing dangerous in it, and leaving it “completely destroyed” in the words of the official BA damage report. British Airways has sensibly declared the damage to be not their problem, as they had nothing to do with destroying the bag. The TSA directed me to a form that generated an illiterate reply from a government subcontractor, sent from a do-not-reply email address, advising that “TSA is not liable for any damage to locks or bags that are required to be opened by force for security purposes” (the same note had an appendix warning me that I should treat this communication as confidential). I’ve yet to have any other communications from the TSA.

Making it possible for the state to open your locks in secret means that anyone who works for the state, or anyone who can bribe or coerce anyone who works for the state, can have the run of your life. Cryptographic locks don’t just protect our mundane communications: cryptography is the reason why thieves can’t impersonate your fob to your car’s keyless ignition system; it’s the reason you can bank online; and it’s the basis for all trust and security in the 21st century.

In her Dimbleby lecture, Martha Lane Fox recalled Aaron Swartz’s words: “It’s not OK not to understand the internet anymore.” That goes double for cryptography: any politician caught spouting off about back doors is unfit for office anywhere but Hogwarts, which is also the only educational institution whose computer science department believes in “golden keys” that only let the right sort of people break your encryption.

(Image: Facepalm, Brandon Grasley, CC-BY))

https://boingboing.net/2017/06/04/theresa-may-king-canute.html

[lukes-writing]

Chapter 10: The Enclave

Project introduction | Previous chapter | Next chapter

Word count: 3500 Warnings: Profanity, gun violence

September 24th, 4:49 PM, Trinity Gate’s inhuman enclave

As Wiccan showed them, there is an underground tunnel from the conference room which leads directly to the enclave. But since there is nothing suspicious about their group, Wiccan decided to take a walk there on the surface. The enclave isn’t far away from the Heap of Ashes.

Kirlian vesseled into a small Transformer toy and let Whisper to carry him in her pocket. Despite the scare Kirlian caused her when they first met, they got used to each other rather quickly.

“Kirlian?” Whisper says while walking towards the enclave.

“Huh?” the Idean replies.

“The birth date on your ID says you are close to sixty years old,” the girl says. “Do Ideans age the same as humans? Are you… immortal?”

“No, Idean age is a rather complicated matter,” Kirlian replies. “We aren’t immortal, but we do live longer than humans, up to two hundred years. Then, our consciousness starts to scatter even when we’re vesseled and in the end, we fade away completely. If you wanted to convert my age into human age… I’d say I’m close to thirty. Fifty-seven is still considered young among Ideans.”

“I think Ideans are fascinating,” Whisper says.

“Trying to pick up a ghost boyfriend?” Parker heard the last sentence and decided to mock the girl a bit, but this time, there’s no apparent spite in his words.

Whisper returns him the favor. “Well, I’d always rather date Kirlian than you.”

“That hurts,” Parker grins.

After a short walk, they finally arrive to the walls of the inhuman enclave. The wall is white, slightly grayed because of the air pollution, with barbed wire and installed cameras on top. The logo of the fictional company, Luminance Haven, can be seen everywhere.

They approach one of the checkpoints - a large metal door embedded in the wall, guarded by four sentinels with assault rifles in hands. There is a small cubicle with an elderly man, tall and good-looking, sitting inside. When they arrive, he’s reading a book in a comfortable armchair.

“Pavel? Could you let us in?” Wiccan talks to the man through a hole in the glass, apparently bulletproof, which is supposed to protect the gatekeeper.

“Wiccan!” the man smiles. “Taking new recruits for a walk? Let me see their IDs.”

Everyone, Wiccan and Ophelia included, scans their ID using a scanner attached to the booth. Pavel is checking the computer screen, nodding slowly as the system recognizes the personal identification cards. Then, after everything is validated, the steel gate opens.

The guards let them pass, but Whisper still shivers at the sight of rifles in their hands. She has never been partial to firearms, not even in video games.

“I guess you haven’t even noticed,” Ophelia says, “but this was your second encounter with inhumans. For safety reasons, Pavel and all the other guards are Fexti. They look completely like humans, but their skin is impenetrable. That means also bulletproof.”

“And they are also strong as hell,” Wiccan adds.

The whole team looks over their shoulders to take another look at the guards, hoping to catch a glimpse of their non-human essence. But the gate is already closing again, so they don’t get the chance. For the first time in their lives, they enter the inhuman enclave.

They don’t really know what they expected, but the first sight is rather disappointing. The space behind the gate looks like a standard upper-middle-class housing estate. There are both family houses and high-rise blocks of flats towering above them. In the distance, something that looks like a shopping and entertainment district can be seen. Greenery grows everywhere, especially in a nearby park.

Parker scowls. “And… that’s it?”

“What did you expect?” Wiccan chuckles. “Did you expect them to live in some lousy ghetto? Or gothic mansions? I said they’re not humans, not that they’re not modern. Besides, when they get used to some high standards, they’re less likely to cause trouble.”

Whisper notices a faint fishy smell. She turns around… then screams and steps back. She sees a figure which appears humanoid, with two legs, two arms and a head, but the visible skin of the being is covered by shiny scales. The girl also notices webbed fingers. The head resembles a mix of a human and a frog, with wide mouth and bulging eyes. Two slits between them serve as a nose, but the creature also has gills on its neck.

And, the most bizarre of all, the being is wearing casual clothes - a T-shirt which seems made of some kind of neoprene and pants from the same material. She even notices a phone in one of the pockets.

The being eyeballs her for a moment, then points its finger at her. “Racist bitch,” it says with a croaky voice.

“Uhm… excuse me! I’m sorry!” Whisper apologizes. “Actually, I’m here for the first time, so I’m not used to seeing… fellows like you. It was a spontaneous reaction.”

The fishman glares at her for a little longer, then he is approached by a child version of himself. “Come on, dad, don’t waste time with these Pinks!”

“Sure, I’m going,” the adult fishman smiles at his son, then takes him by the hand and walks away.

“I’m sorry!” Whisper yells after him for the last time.

“Gillscaly,” Wiccan explains, trying to hold back laughter. “Usually harmless, they often run business. Let’s be honest, they’re quite into money. Some of the sub-races are venomous, but those are rare cases.”

“Gotta admit, that was fucking weird,” Parker mutters.

“And keep in mind we just entered,” Ophelia reminds him with a smile.

They walk deeper into the enclave, towards the commercial district. There they see much more inhumans. To their surprise, a lot of them look like humans to the point they couldn’t be told apart. Some of them have only minor oddities, such as differently shaped ears or claws on their fingers - this is usually accompanied by excessive body hair.

Then, there are… other beings. Whisper remembers the Mos Eisley cantina from Star Wars, a place where aliens of all possible shapes and sizes meet. Well, the enclave isn’t as extreme, but still, all four newcomers have a hard time getting used to all these different beings.

They meet several large goliaths whose skin seems to be made of stone and large tusks are protruding from their mouths. However, they seem surprisingly meek. One of them, wearing a suit, even greets Wiccan politely. The man returns the greeting.

Sienna gets creeped out by a pair of strange, ghost-like figures with thin limbs hovering above the ground. Their skin is ghastly white and they have no face, just an empty sphere on a thin neck. They’re wearing ethereal white dresses. After they pass the group, they fly away without saying a word.

Introducing all the inhumans would take too long - Whisper tries to count them and she finds out that before they arrived at the shopping district, they met about twenty different inhuman races. Also, she doesn’t know how many races are among those who look like humans.

None of them, even the most vicious-looking inhumans, does act hostile towards the group. They all seem to be civilized. Of course they are, Whisper thinks, otherwise they wouldn’t be allowed to live in such a nice neighborhood. But still, some of them are scary.

“And here we have the heart of the enclave,” Wiccan announces.

The commercial district is made to appear like a scientific complex from afar, to help the enclave maintain its cover. In fact, it’s a large shopping mall not different from the standard ones, except for several stores with goods which serve mysterious reasons.

The place isn’t crowded. The enclave’s population density is rather low - right, Wiccan said the inhumans are close to extinction. But there can still be seen families on a weekend shopping streak, inhumans of different races chatting with one another, often using strange languages.

“It’s kind of sad when you think about it,” Whisper says when they pass a Gillscaly laughing at something one of the tusked goliaths said. “Look at them. They have no trouble talking to each other even though one looks like a boar and the other one is basically a talking fish.”

“That’s not weird at all,” Wiccan says. “Ettins and Gillscalys cooperate rather often. It’s because…”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” Whisper interrupts him. “If you just look around, there are dozens of different crea… uhm… beings of all shapes and sizes, and they can stand each other with ease. On the other hand, humans… they are able to hate each other to death because of different skin color.”

Parker rolls his eyes. “Great. Hippie girl giving a speech about racism. How insightful.”

“She is right, though,” Sienna supports the younger girl. “Imagine what would the alt-rights do with this guy,” she points at a human-like inhuman whose skin changes color to bright pink when he starts to laugh. Then she takes a nonchalant look at Parker. “And guess what? I wouldn’t be surprised if you were some kind of racist.”

The man shrugs. “When I was younger, I spent a few months with a skinhead gang until I realized how pointless it was. Now I can say I’m not racist since all races equally can kiss my ass.”

Wiccan chuckles at this statement and Ophelia scolds him with a look.

“That’s just the human nature,” Kirlian says. “They will never learn. Ideans have it easy - we don’t have a physical form, so we can’t be shallow even if we wanted. We always look for a mind, because mind is basically all we are. While you, narrow-minded humans, still fight over skin color.”

Whisper smirks. “Look, an Idean condemns racism while acting racist towards humans.”

Kirlian’s Transformer vessel squirms in the girl’s pocket. “That’s not racism, I’m just stating the facts. I support the theory Ideans are, in fact, the descendants of humans who transcended beyond their physical forms. That would mean Ideans are superior to humans.”

“Yep, that sounds like an Idean supremacist,” Gary remarks.

“Oh, shut up, all of you,” Kirlian sighs.

They continue further to the northwest. As they pass the luxurious heart of the enclave, the surroundings start to change. The clean, friendly neighborhoods give in to gray, dismal housing estates and sketchy buildings that apparently serve for questionable purposes. The streets also start to get less clean. In fact, there are several garbage cans overthrown on the street and several reptilian creatures about as big as a large dog with scrawny, bony limbs are feasting on its content.

“Is this how you imagined the enclave?” Wiccan says.

“It… doesn’t look nice,” Whisper peeps.

“Ya bet it’s not nice,” the man gives her a grim smile. “This part of the enclave is dubbed ‘the Pit’. The inhumans who are… less adaptable live there. And, most importantly, the Pit’s inhumans don’t have a healthy relationship with humans, the less with The Society’s Enforcers.”

“So something like inhuman Bronx?” Parker remarks.

Both Ophelia and Sienna give him a scolding look.

“I know you’d rather spend your days outside the Pit, but it’s kinda clear that the Enforcers have the most work there. Inhuman gangs, crime, violence, rebellious groups who want to escape the enclave and overthrow the humans. Just normal things, you’ll get used to it.”

“When this man starts using this casual tone, it’s never anything good,” Gary tells Whisper.

His predictions are proven to be right when Wiccan continues: “I guess a little field trip can never hurt. Don’t be scared, nothing can happen to you. It’s perfectly safe.”

“The famous last words,” Parker utters.

Outside the Pit, the new team members felt rather comfortable despite all the surreal creatures around them. The Pit itself is more or less empty, but the atmosphere is oppressive and the new Enforcers jump at the slightest sound like paranoiacs. Even though it’s full daylight, it doesn’t make the district any more welcoming.

Leaning against the wall, an inhuman in raggy clothes is sitting on the street with a bottle of liquor in his hands. He looks human, except for his veins which colored into venomous purple, creating a spiderweb-like pattern on his skin.

“Careful,” Wiccan says and walks as far away from the man as possible. “Drunk Volatiles are like a bomb with a short fuse… literally. He could explode if we touched him.”

Ophelia explains: “Volatiles got their name from the volatile substances that are in their bodies instead of standard body fluids. They change composition according to their mood, health and substances they used. It can turn into powerful acids and even explosive fluids.”

“Remind me to never shake hands with a Volatile,” Sienna utters.

“They usually wear thick gloves,” Wiccan replies. “But this one apparently doesn’t.”

All the inhumans they encounter look rather miserable. Most of them eyeball the team with unconcealed spite in their eyes. The four new recruits would love to turn around and leave this God-forsaken place, but they are aware they will have to get used to it if they want to work for The Society.

They approach a tumbledown building labeled as HERRING’S inhuman pub. The writings on the wooden door give away humans aren’t welcome there at all.

“This is where the trouble began,” Ophelia turns to Wiccan. “Poor Vlade. I miss him.”

“We all do,” Kirlian sighs. “I should have been sent to spy on these Fext thugs - Vlade infiltrating their ranks was a plan way too risky. If we realized it sooner…”

“Regrets are now useless,” Wiccan says. “They won’t bring Vlade back.”

Gary raises a question: “Who was Vlade?”

Before anyone of the former Team Menhir can answer, several dark shadows approach the team and surround them. “Shriekers - just what we needed,” Wiccan grumbles.

When the light shines at the crooked figures, it reveals they are basically tall, humanoid birds, each of them about as tall as Parker. Their bodies are covered by feathers in various colors and patterns, usually black, gray, brown or dark red. Their wings seem to be transformed into human-like arms ending with three bony talons and a thumb set against them, allowing the creatures to grasp things.

“Look what we have here, the Enforcers,” one of them croaks, circling the group. Their head resembles some kind of mix between a human and an owl, with short, yet menacing beak on their mouth instead of lips. The speaker eyeballs the new recruits with yellow bulging eyes of a bird of prey.

Whisper remembers a picture of a bird called potoo she found utterly creepy. These inhumans are similar, except that they look much more menacing. They are wearing leather clothing with punk-style accessories including chains around their necks and spiked bracelets.

“Good to see you, Ach-khran,” Wiccan replies, making a peculiar throaty sound when pronouncing the name. It seems that unlike Ideans, these bird creatures don’t adapt human names.

Ach-khran has a distinctive crest on his head made of black-and-red feathers. That probably makes him a leader of this gang. He strides towards Wiccan on thin bird legs. “I su-khh-ose those are new recruits you hired after the unfortunate de-khh-ise of you Fext friend,” the inhuman speaks.

The birdman talks with a strange accent because his beak limits his ability to speak. He’s not able to pronounce “b”, “p” and “m” at all since he has no lips and his “f” also sounds more like a hiss. He replaces missing phonemes with a throaty sound similar to the one in his name.

“Yes. This is their first time in the enclave,” Wiccan chats casually.

At that moment, Ach-khran pulls out a gun from a holster on his thigh. Several members of the gang follow his example. “In that case, khh-aybe it would khh-e khh-etter if we eli-khh-inated them khh-efore they turn into a khh-roblem,” he cackles. “What do you think?”

The team expected many things when they entered the Pit, but a gang of bird creatures dressed in punk clothing aiming guns at their heads was something beyond their imagination. Whisper shivers in fear, Parker keeps uttering curses. Sienna and Gary look dazed.

“I think that’s not necessary,” Wiccan tries to calm the situation down. “It wouldn’t be worth the trouble. Keep in mind you and your gang are already in our spotlight.”

“It will khh-e worth it,” Ach-khran cackles and points the gun’s muzzle at Whisper’s forehead. The girl squeals, tears appear in her eyes. The rest of the gang lets out a laugh. “The life here is much khh-etter without The Society poking their noses into our khh-usiness.”

“You know you can’t live without The Society’s protection,” Wiccan objects.

“Khh-ullshit!” the birdman shrieks, the crest on his head fluttering.

“Just gun the-khh down and get the fuck out of here,” one of the gang members said - judging from the voice and clothing, it’s a female. “We can bla-khh-e it on so-khh-eone else.”

The situation seems hopeless - Whisper is reconciling with the fact her first visit of the enclave will also be her last. But at least she managed to see something only a few chosen ones saw. The humankind’s biggest secret. It gives her cold comfort.

Suddenly, she hears a buzzing sound which grows on intensity with time. The flies which feasted on the nearby piles of garbage formed a large hive which attacks Ach-krhan. The birdman shrieks as the hive obscures his vision. He fires his weapon several times, but Whisper is already down on the ground.

The rest of the conflict happens way too fast.

Whisper hears a slight hiss giving away Kirlian has left his current vessel. A second later, they hear choking coming from the female Shrieker. Her scarf is tightened around her neck like a noose, cutting out the air supply. Kirlian must have vesseled into it.

Parker tackles a nearby Shrieker, then delivers a few crushing direct punches on his feathery face. The inhuman staggers backward and drops his gun.

This is Sienna’s chance. She quickly grabs the weapon and aims it at the fray, holding it with her both hands. “In the name of The Society, drop your weapons and give up, else I will shoot!” she shouts with a firm voice full of authority. One of the Shriekers tries to disobey - Sienna pulls the trigger and the bullet ends up in the inhuman’s shoulder. The injured birdman collapses on the ground and groans in pain.

Sienna pans the gun across the whole scene, causing some of the Shriekers to drop the guns and put their hands in the air. Some of them, including Ach-khran, show the remains of defiance, but Sienna’s tenacious glare combined with the gun aimed at their heads causes them to finally surrender.

“Okay, now take your friend to the hospital and get out of here,” Wiccan says. “You’re lucky that I don’t feel like arresting anyone today. But maybe if Sienna decides to…”

One of the bird creatures carries his injured, groaning comrade towards the heart of the enclave where a hospital is located. The rest quickly disperses.

The situation calms down. The sounds of gunfire attracted several rubberneckers, but they quickly leave again once they realize there is The Society involved.

Sienna’s voice sounded firm and powerful when she was intimidating the Shriekers, but now, her trembling hands give away she was more afraid than the inhumans. She takes several deep breaths and has to lean against a wall to keep standing, not minding her designer jacket getting dirty.

Wiccan encourages her by putting his hand on her shoulder. “That was something exceptional,” he claims. “It’s your first day in the service and you’re already playing it badass.”

“I was… I was so scared,” she moans. “I thought they’re gonna shoot me.”

“Now tell me, girl,” Wiccan looks her in the eyes. “Show me one person who wouldn’t be scared when facing a gang of weird creatures they’ve never seen before armed with guns? It’s important that you concealed your fear and managed to save the day.”

He takes a look at the rest of the team. Parker is examining a small, bleeding gash on his knuckles which probably hit the edge of the Shrieker’s beak. And Gary is trying to console Whisper who is kneeling on the ground completely petrified. Tears are streaming down her face and she seems to be hyperventilating.

“Whisper? Are you alright?” Ophelia asks her and offers her a hand which the girl accepts. She stands up, but she can barely stand on her wobbly knees.

“Y...yeah,” Whisper peeps. “I will be.”

Wiccan makes sure Kirlian is once again vesseled in the Transformer toy, then he grabs his niece around the shoulders and starts to walk towards the enclave’s heart. The rest of the team follows him - the new recruits got to know the situation in the Pit and they need some time to let it sink in.

Author’s Note

I wholeheartedly thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed the chapter, and if you did, please leave a comment, send me a message or share and let more people know about this story! You can also consider a small donation at www.paypal.me/lukassladky. Have a great day and stay tuned for the next chapter!

[geek-patient-zero]

Part 1, Chapter 13

Or: Encyclopedia Vampirica

Blood War: Masquerade of the Red Death Trilogy Volume 1

Paris—March 14, 1994

Paris is a city of many mysteries.

Why are Parisian stereotypes simultaneously sexy and repulsive? Did Victor Hugo ever get to fuck the cathedral? What’s Jean Reno doing these days?

Take, for example, the electric power lines leading into the foundation of Notre Dame Cathedral. No records exist showing why the cables are there or where they lead. They are live wires, supplying electricity to a location somewhere beneath the church. Since no one complains about the lines, the powers that be in the public works department leave them strictly alone. The policy, as in most big-city administrations, is, if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.

The first page and a half of Chapter 13 is about describing several weird things about the city and how Phantomas is responsible for all of them. The most interesting what-was-Stonehenge-type mystery (or would be if we didn’t already know the truth) is the network of underground tunnels under the city, not to be confused with the Catacombs.

Located hundreds of feet beneath the ground, these passages are not the result of any known city engineering project. Impossible to reach, no man has walked through them in public memory.

Beats me how mortals were able to learn about the tunnels when they can’t even get to them. Maybe they used a ground penetrating radar, but modern ones can only reach a hundred feet at best.

No one knows who built the tunnels or when, but official policy, considered ludicrous in-universe, is that they’re the remains of an underground Roman fortress. ‘Course, we already know from the first Phantomas chapter that the tunnels are for the old vampire’s personal use.

The tunnels aside, the mysteries described in this chapter are more along the lines of modern infrastructure quirks like the power lines. There’s a two hundered year-old Vert-Galant warehouse whose owners’ identities through the centuries are unknown to everyone but whose rent is paid promptly by a Swiss bank cashier’s check each month. Shipments of computer supplies and expensive art prints are delivered to the warehouse, but nothing is ever shipped out and no one knows what happens to the deliveries. The clerks who work in it are paid stupidly well not to ask.

Phantomas knew the truth lurking behind the mysteries. The power lines snaked down to his hidden lair deep beneath the Crypte Archeologique in the main square fronting Notre Dame. The tunnels, constructed in secret over the centuries through subterfuge and deception, provided him with access to hundreds of locations in Paris. The warehouse belonged to him and the purchases were made through the convenience of ordering merchandise by computer.

What he used the warehouse for during the 190 years before online shopping isn’t said.

The necessary capital came from his bank account in Switzerland. The funds had been raised over the centuries by the judicious use of blackmail among the rich and famous of Paris. No one, living or undead, in the vast metropolis could keep a secret from the prying eyes and ears of Phantomas.

In short, all of Paris’ little mysteries are funded by upper class sins to power and maintain a vampire’s PC. In front of which is where we find ol’ Phantomas.

He’d spent the past few hours on a computer terminal trying to find anything on the Red Death, only to find nothing. A scholar in life and a Nosferatu in death, Phantomas is obsessed with information. Despite reaching that age where passions are long since cooled and when, as the prologue indicated, he should’ve started craving only the blood of other Kindred, Phantomas maintained a passion for knowledge.

Phantomas lived for facts. He collected them, saved them, ordered them, and tried to weave them into a pattern. Especially facts concerning vampires.

Phantomas hasn’t been searching for “Red Death” on Ask Jeeves. He has his own personal database.

Here we learn about Phantomas’ “great project” and why the Red Death had called him “the meddling record keeper.” For the past millennium, he’d been writing an encyclopedia about the Kindred.

A thousand years ago he had conceived of his great project involving the history of the Kindred. He had been working on this masterpiece of information ever since. It was his obsession, his dream. [...] It contained every fact, every scrap of information he had been able to learn about the Cainites during the past millennium.

There was a Tumblr thread going around about the idea of vampires using their immortality to focus on their personal hobbies, like creating new plant hybrids through a century of cross-breeding. Not evil magic plants either, just regular garden stuff.

The invention of computers had greatly helped his work, eliminating the tedious work of hand-writing the information into journals. Also, the powerful database he used enabled him to cross-reference millions of vampiric acts, establishing clear links between hundreds of seemingly unrelated incidents and occurrences.”

Search engines and tabs understandably being a bigger deal back in ‘94.

The most important feature of Phantomas’ project is a “family tree” of the Kindred, starting with Caine and including enough vampires for him to consider it “the most complete family tree ever attempted of the Kindred race.” 

Along with describing each Kindred’s relationship to the other Cainites, the chart also featured a detailed biographical profile of the vampire.

This recorded genealogy, backed up by “a hundred different sources,” includes thousands of Methuselahs and other one thousand plus year-old vampires that could potentially fit the Red Death’s profile, but so far it hasn’t helped.

About those sources, or at least the modern ones. Despite his age, it turns out Phantomas is one of the few vampires who can keep up with the times.

Phantomas had been using computers since their invention and was perhaps the greatest hacker in the world. He could access the files from any major data bank or information file. No security code was safe from his descramble program. The secrets of the world were at his gnarled fingertips.

You’re never too old to hack the planet.

I’d be annoyed that we have yet another character who has to be the greatest or most whatever in the world, but it’s all in service of his hobby and he doesn’t seem to be the unknown power behind a major historical event like Troile’s diablerie of his sire or the rise of the Giovanni, so I’ll let it slide.

Most of Phantomas’ data came from the mainframes used by the Camarilla and the Sabbat. Both sects maintained extensive code-word systems to protect their files from their hated enemy. Neither were aware that a third party, uninvolved in their blood war, had been stealing data from them for years.

Phantomas had to sift through mountains of awful Toreador poetry and Tzimisce how-to guides on gift wrapping using only one toddler, but he’s tough. He endured.

Phantomas also gets his info from the usual sources: the CIA, SAS, CID,   Sûreté, Mossad, and KGB.

He was insatiable in his quest to make his encyclopedia as accurate as possible. That it was never seen by anyone else didn’t matter. Phantomas worked for his own satisfaction.

Yeah, but when social media gets started, we’ll see if Phantomas can resist dumping the whole thing on ShreckNet MySpace.

Speaking of ShreckNet, that’s the secret vampire dark web created, maintained, and used mainly by Clan Nosferatu. I’ve heard that writers used to like to emphasize it’s security, like in Bloodlines when Mitnick talks about wrecking several computers just to break into an unimportant server, so I thought it was weird that Weinberg resisted the urge to namedrop it as one of the databases his greatest hacker character broke into. I looked it up and it looks like ShreckNet wasn’t a part of the lore until the release of the revised Nosferatu sourcebook in 2000.

Phantomas has also got taps on phone company computers all over the world, getting more intel on the Red Death’s attacks on Camarilla strongholds.

Together with his own information on the monster’s appearance in Paris, Phantomas had fed the encapsulated data into his computer. Then he had programmed the machine to search and evaluate his files for those Kindred powerful enough to wield the powers of the Red Death. He purposefully had the machine eliminate the thirteen members of the third generation of vampires. It wouldn’t require a computer to tell when they had arisen from their ages-long torpor.

After initiating the search, he realizes he forgot to exclude Caine and the second generation, and has to start the whole thing over again in the age of dial-up.

(No, not really.)

His proto-Google showed twenty-seven possible Red Death identities. Then he does a second search, eliminating any vampire either “engaged in major blood feuds” for whatever reason or in torpor.

To Phantomas’ frustration, the procedure left two possible names, neither covered in his files of biographies—

Boy oh boy, I wonder who they could be...

Anis, Queen of Night, and Lameth, the Dark Messiah. Both were legendary figures of the fourth generation. But among the Kindred, legends often were based in fact.

“Queen of Night,” huh? That’s a kinda generic title for a woman vampire. I might’ve talked trash about Lameth’s title, but it’s a little better than Queen of Night. And given how petty immortals in stories like this tend to be, you’d think an Antediluvian woman like Arikel or Ennoia would have shut this shit from an upstart Methuselah down long ago.

I’m also gonna go out on a limb and say that, from what we’ve seen of her characterization and how we’ve yet to see the Red Death feel up his own amazing tits while talking about the power of passion, she isn’t our culprit.

We’re given summaries of the two Methuselahs. Lameth, as we already know, was a powerful sorcerer, considered the greatest one “to ever walk the earth,” believed to have been taught by “one of the primeval forces that had once walked the earth,” but no two tales can agree on which. We’re then finally told how he got his grandiose title.

According to myth, Lameth discovered a potion that artificially induced Golconda, the mental state that allowed vampires to exist in perfect harmony with their surroundings. Whoever controlled the elixir controlled the Kindred. That was why Lameth had been dubbed ‘The Dark Messiah.’

And subbed “The Great Evil Jesus”

He had vanished into the mists of history over five thousand years ago. Though rumors of his meddling in Cainite affairs continued to surface.

It’s that time again. Time to pause the story so I can talk about vampire crap.

Golconda’s the name for a sort of vampire enlightenment, supposedly discovered by the Salubri Antediluvian Saulot in India and the overall goal of Clan Salubri. Or it was, until Clan Dick Wizards slaughtered them. It’s thought to be complete freedom from the Beast, or the Beast and Human aspects of a vampire’s nature becoming perfectly balanced. What, exactly, any of that means...

Early game books gave some suggestions, like no longer going into frenzies, or not needing blood so much, or losing all Kindred weaknesses. Hell, it could even be a full-on cure, turning a vampire back into a mortal and maybe even keeping a few powers. Obviously that last one isn’t very popular among storytellers and players.

Later editions made it more vague, and ultimately, it’s another one of those things that’s up to the storyteller. Is it true enlightenment, a balance of one’s two natures, not human yet something beyond Kindred? Some kind of vampire Super Saiyan? Is it true salvation in the eyes of God? Maybe it’s an impossible ideal, something you’re unable to obtain but still something one should strive for, like perfection in your craft or Enuff Dakka. Or maybe it’s all bullshit, a fairy tale believed by the desperate and the misinformed.

How you reach Golconda’s also vague, but what’s there’s your typical enlightenment routine. First you’ve gotta find out about it, which isn’t easy thanks again to the dick wizards. Then you’ve gotta maintain your humanity and feel remorse, or in gameplay terms, keep your Humanity stat at 7 or above and never, ever frenzy. While doing that, you make up for any wrongdoings you’ve ever done as much as possible. It’s just like My Name is Earl, only the guy’s atoning for things like “Hey, I’m sorry I diablerized your sire” or “Hey, sorry I ghouled your dad and casually killed him to make a point I don’t remember.”

During all this, you’ve probably got a guru helping you out. Preferably a real (vampire) guru and not a cult leader or gigolo.

If you do all that enough you’ll reach the final step and go into a trance called a suspire, where you’ll have a spirit journey into the self, the soul, or whatever you want to call it. The whole thing’s a test you only get one shot at. If you succeed, congrats, you’ve achieved Golconda! If you fail, it means you’ll never reach Golconda, most likely because your brain broke so hard you’ve turned into a mindless animal.

Or you can skip all that and drink a magic elixir.

What I’ve learned from fiction and actual real-life religions is that there’s no shortcut to enlightenment. You can’t just do one weird trick and suddenly reach full understanding of yourself and the world. It’s supposed to be a trial. Now, Lameth and Anis believed the elixir would cure them of their compulsion to drink blood, but we don’t know what it actually did yet. We’ll have to wait to see whether the elixir was a lead-in to a moral, something beneficial but mistaken for Golconda after millennia of legends, or actually did induce Golconda and it’s more OP shit.

Alright, back to the story. We’ve heard what legends say about Lameth, and now it’s Anis’ turn.

Anis, Queen of Night, was a contemporary of Lameth’s. Myths dating back to the Second City held her responsible for the revolt in which the third generation rose up and killed their sires.

She did that too? Next you’ll be telling me she was the one who got Caine to kill his brother.

She was described as the most beautiful woman who ever walked the Earth (of course she was). And among the most deadly.

That’s the third time in a single page the phrase “walked the Earth” was used. You’re a writer and editor, Mr. Weinberg. Stretch those writing chops a little more.

The legends of the Second City described Anis as consumed with ambition. She was said to possess seductive charms nearly as intense as Lilith, the lover of Adam and one of the most powerful of demons.

To ever walk the Earth, I’m sure.

And yeah, of course Lilith would fit into the World of Darkness somewhere. Jewish mythological figure and favorite of Wiccans and occultists everywhere, Lilith was said to be the first wife of Adam, the actual second human created by God and molded equally from the same clay as her husband. Adam wanted her to be subservient to him, so she dumped his ass, left the Garden of Eden, and started banging demons out of spite. In V:TM’s backstory, God cursed her for this, dooming her to never truly know the love of another. Meaning anyone she fancied would ditch her eventually.

It was actually Lilith who invented the vampires’ superpowers. She found Caine, injured by all those people pissed at him for inventing murder, healed and fed him, and taught him the powers that would eventually become the Kindred disciplines. Then he ditched her too. In Caine’s defense, it was the curse, and anyway dating his dad’s ex-wife must’ve been too weird for him. But Lilith’s still pissed about it...

Anis, too, had disappeared more than five millennia ago. And, like Lameth, rumors of her reappearance circulated constantly among the Kindred.

Some say she’s the creature in the Patterson-Gimlin film. Hey, who says standards of beauty weren’t different back in the Second City?

Phantomas is frustrated that his only search results are mythological figures, so he changes tactics and looks for powers resembling the Red Death’s fiery death touch. He looks through disciplines, Paths of Enlightenment, and even the latest developments in chemical and biological warfare. He also searches for any mention of demons granting someone powers like it. In the end, he finds jack.

The Nosferatu shook his head in distress. Recent reports from America, obtained by phone taps on supposedly safe lines, indicated that there might be more than one Red Death. The possibility of an entire bloodline of vampires not included in his genealogy chart depressed him. He had worked for hundreds of years on his chronology. It was inconceivable that he had missed an entire branch of the Kindred family. Yet the facts seemed to point directly at that conclusion.

Poor guy. I’m no historian, but I bet this is something they go through at least once in their lives. Someone out there feels for you, buddy.

Phantomas pounded his keyboard in frustration.

Phantomas walked so PC gamers could run.

Lameth or Anis had to be the Red Death. Or one of them had founded a bloodline, all of whose members possessed the power of the Red Death. That was the only possible solution to the mystery. Still, he was not convinced it was correct.

Sherlock Holmes puffed on his pipe thoughtfully. “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

“Fuck you, Monsieur Cokehead,” replied Phantomas.

Nor did any of his speculations, Phantomas suddenly realized, address the equally mysterious young man who had warned him in advance of the Red Death. And who knew his name.

As if set off by this thought, his keyboard, luckily not broken by his mighty undead fists a moment ago, suddenly starts typing on its own.

Shocked, Phantomas lifted his hands off the console. The keys continued to type, as if hit by invisible fingers.

Reuban’s been watching Ghostwriter. The show’s gonna end in ‘95 so let’s hope he ain’t too big a fan.

A single phrase appeared on the computer monitor.

“Lonely Single Women in Your Area!”

Staring at it, Phantomas shivered. He had no idea what the words meant. Yet he was convinced that his stray thought about the man in the Louvre had triggered this response from his computer. Voice trembling, he read the name aloud.

“The Sheddim.”

Actually it was “djefhfkhfkffdThe Sheddim.” The narration didn’t say Phantomas or Reuban deleted the results of his keyboard pounding.

Shedim are spirits or demons from early Jewish mythology thought to represent foreign gods, but they have other theorized origins, as the children of Adam and Lilith or humans God didn’t finish making before he rested on the seventh day of creation. Here’s a link if you want to know more.

With that ominous name, this chapter ends and so does Part 1 of Blood War.  Part 2 marks a change in viewpoint characters, so we’re gonna take an extended hiatus from Dire McCann, Flavia, Madeleine Giovanni, Phantomas, Makish, and company. We’ll see them again in Part 3, which suits me fine. I need a break from McCann’s “Ohoho, if you only knew what I knew” thing.

[mercyofficial]

out of the dark

summary: Sombra's two favorite things are making new friends and exposing corporate corruption, and today she intends to do both.

notes: inspired by this art by @greyopal! i love these two so much ahhhh, and im definitely gonna write more for them!

ao3 link

Her printer has to be the slowest in the world. She shelled out a thousand dollars for this machine and it’s been taking ten minutes to print like, seven files. Sombra always keeps a hard copy of her work until it’s finished. Then she burns it.

  Some people use paper shredders, but Sombra can’t stand the thought of leaving a trace. That eye is constantly in her head.

  The files are pulled up on her computer screen, glowing a dim blue. Risky (what if someone were looking through the window?), but she wants to admire her work. Vishkar may not be anywhere near as good at helping people as the public thinks they are, but they do have excellent computer security. Nothing is impenetrable, though, not to Sombra - especially not corporate corruption.

  Grabbing the ink-dampened paper, Sombra quickly flips through the pages, ensuring all had printed correctly. They’ll be locked inside a file cabinet (protected by three alarms and fourteen different kinds of computer-controlled encrypted locks) until she’s finished with them, and then she’ll burn everything in there and change the locks. Sombra never writes a password down, too risky. Besides, if I forgot one, I could probably hack into my own system, she thinks with amusement. Although that’s probably not a good thing, maybe she should beef up. Talon won’t be pleased if she asks more money for security - but she’s a valuable asset . So they’ll pay up. Always do. Maybe she should ask for a horse ranch, claim it’s vital to her work. Or seventy copies of the Linkin Park discography and hide them in Reaper’s room.

  Snickering at her own jokes, Sombra throws the files in the cabinet and shuts the door, which automatically locks. She doesn’t bother to grab any extra equipment on the way out the door to catch her flight. Her internal cyber-enhancements will suffice for this job - well, job isn’t exactly the right word. This is more of a personal project. She isn’t exactly expecting resistance, anyway.

  Will the files be enough to sink the company? Of course not. If (and probably when) she publishes them, they’ll be a PR disaster, but there’ll be a few firings and some monetary loss and some tearful, paid off citizens going on about how much Vishkar has done for their community and how they know they can learn from their mistakes, and ten days later the company will have three new major contracts.

  They are enough to make a new friend, though. And Sombra loves making new friends.

  ----------------

  She’s parked herself in a cyber cafe near Vishkar’s headquarters, in a corner, giving the security a once-over. She already has the blueprints, and in particular, the on-location apartment of her soon-to-be new friend. This was not going to be difficult. Nowadays, companies are so focused on keeping out hackers that they neglect physical security. With that in mind, her stolen translocating technology, invisibility camouflage, and, of course, laser gun, will practically guarantee her unlimited access to a building if she’s careful. And Sombra is always careful.

  Her target is Satya Vaswani, aka Symmetra (Symmetra, symmetry, subtle, much. Sombra spent a few minutes eye-rolling when she read that one.) A top Architech at Vishkar, and seems to truly believe her company is making the world a better place. Naive, but Sombra can’t be too annoyed with her. They’re quite alike, after all, if she thinks about it: impoverished with a difficult childhood, an aptitude for technology that got them out of the slums, and willing enough to commit crimes for their aims.

  That’s where it ends, though. Satya had been plucked from the streets by Vishkar and made their golden girl, but Sombra had joined gangs and fought everyone and everything tooth and nail for what she has now. Satya wants to improve the world. Sombra just wants to control it.

  Though, considering Vishkar’s methods and that Symmetra cooperated with them, they might be similar that way, as well. Although she did have to note, Symmetra went along. Who knows what Satya gets up to in her free time? Sombra can’t help but giggle. She doubts a secret rebellion. From what she’s read and seen of the girl, she seems like a rule-follower, regardless of what the rules were.

  These might change that, though , Sombra thinks, glancing down at the screen displaying the files she’d hacked directly from the CEO’s laptop a week or two ago.

  Sombra had thought about going after the CEO himself. The files she has won’t sink the company, but they’ll sink him , and she’s sure he’d do whatever she asked to keep himself afloat. But what Vishkar’s doing strikes something in Sombra, because they’re hurting those like she had been, orphans on streets who don’t have the talents she has to get themselves out. Sombra wants the men in charge of Vishkar in prison, at least, if she can’t get them dead. And they won’t be any help if they’re in prison or hell.

  But, in Satya’s case, Sombra seriously doubts she knows what’s really going on at Vishkar. Maybe she really should call it naivety, to not realize, but she has a feeling it isn’t - Satya seems like she really does just want to make the world a better place, and may be doing some unconscious selective noticing to accomplish it. Sombra can empathize with that. And not only does she want a new friend (the leading manipulator of hard light tech? a force ), but maybe she’s taking a small liking to Satya. And it would probably be better finding out your life’s work was nearly pointless because of corruption in private, rather than from national TV the next morning, with reporters hunting down every bit of contact information you have.

   It’s a weekend night, and the clubs are full as Sombra makes her way to the headquarters. The multitudes of people on the street make it easy to slip around to a back entrance, go invisible, and take out the security guy with a nerve strike to the neck. Touching her cybernetic fingers to the locks, programs she’s already tested on locks just like this one spring to life, slipping into the bugs and wires and feeding the codes back to her. She drops a translocator in a bush for safety and sneaks in, again going invisible just long enough to reach the nearest security camera. Within seconds, her custom applications have thrown a bug into the system that’ll feed the cameras endless ten-second loops. With luck, the person watching the security cameras will be like most corporate employees who watch security cameras - bored and playing the latest hot app instead of paying attention.

  If not, and she senses any alarm, she’s pretty sure she gave herself enough time to get to the security room and place a well-aimed laser blast at his chest before he notices her. Won’t kill him, but he won’t be happy. Which doesn’t matter to her, of course. Sombra doesn’t go out of her way to kill. As long as he’s out of her way, she doesn’t exactly care.

  Now Sombra really books it, dashing through the hallways using the blueprint she memorized, only occasionally pausing to confirm a direction or go invisible to let some politely-laughing businessmen carrying briefcases walk through. She decides to take the elevator, figuring her invisibility will last long enough to make the ride if someone gets on. Vishkar’s headquarters are gigantic , a sign of the company’s power, but luckily they aren’t exactly tall. Dashing into the hallway where the elevators are, she clicks the up button and slips in, consulting her blueprint once more before pressing 7.

  As it’s night, the headquarters aren’t busy, so Sombra isn’t bothered - and once she gets off at floor 7, there’s even less people. Even if she hadn’t already hacked into Satya’s calendar, Sombra seriously doubts that she wouldn’t find the Architech in her room. Satya didn’t give off a vibe of friendliness, and a look further back into her calendar, with events meticulously added and color-coded and lacking any color for “fun”, confirmed this.

  Sombra smiles slightly as she strolls along the hallway - there’s another similarity to her little list. She herself certainly isn’t against going out to a club and flirting with a girl or guy or two of each, but relationships of any kind are off the table. The whole “hacker on a one-woman crusade to take control of the world” sort of prevents that, and friends are just going to want stuff in the end. Her closest companions are probably frequent Talon mission mates Reaper and Widowmaker, and when the people you’re closest to are a literal wraith and a blue ballet-dancer-turned-assassin, you probably don’t have many friends.

  She gets to Satya’s door. It’s a simple, sleek white piece of work, computer controlled with some great security. Unless you’re Sombra, of course, in which case it takes a few touches and a click. It would have been even easier if she could have just ripped the passwords from Satya’s computer, but the other woman didn’t seem to write any passwords down, either. I wonder if she’s as paranoid as I am, ha. Sombra activates her invisibility and drops a translocator before entering the keycode and opening the door with a soft whoosh. She steps inside, and it closes behind her with nearly no sound.

  The room is stark, all white and pale blue with not much customization. It’s quite beautiful and modern, or at least Sombra thinks so. She doesn’t have as much time to explore as she would like, because apparently Satya also doesn’t believe in bedtime and is sitting on a ledge, next to her window. Presumably, she was enjoying the admittedly quite excellent view of the night sky before her door mysteriously opened, though she doesn’t seem to be panicking. Sombra takes her time, making sure the door has locked them in and all the alarms are disabled before plopping down on the cushion across from Satya and making herself visible.

  “Hola, amiga,” she chirps, resting her elbow against the window and giving her a bright smile. Satya looks unamused. Sombra had thought she was quite pretty from the television interviews she’d seen (and the secret selfies she may have examined when going through the contents of Satya’s phone), and the woman is even more beautiful up close, dark brown eyes giving Sombra a once-over before lifting back up to meet Sombra’s own.  

  “I would ask who you are, but I doubt you intend to tell me.”

  Sombra giggles. “Ooh, you’re astute! No, I don’t. I know who you are, though, Satya. Quite a name you’ve made for yourself at Vishkar, yes?”

  Satya frowns. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but I will not be bribed. Or undermine the company, so don’t even try.” Sombra notices something, in her right hand, presumably some device used to alarm someone who will make life far more irritating for Sombra. She leans over, quick as a flash, placing her hand over the other woman’s own and grinning right in her face.

  “Oh, I don’t need to get you to do it. They do enough of that themselves. I’m just interested in, oh….. informing you.”

  There’s a slight pause, and then she feels Satya’s fingers, slowly, one by one, remove themselves from the button. Sombra snatches it out of her hand, but Satya doesn’t react, except for her suspicious frown deepening as Sombra leans back.

  “I’m listening.”

  Sombra smiles. She’s played this game, a thousand times before. Steal incriminating files, sneak in, show them to the right person, and bam! A lovely, helpful new friend. Sombra may not have any close friends, but she certainly has a lot of them.

  Sombra slips off the cushion and walks over to the table, beckoning for Satya to join her. Warily, Satya gets up, quietly walking over a wooden chair and seating herself in it, expectantly.

  “Just wait a moment.” She pulls up her screen through her gloves, clicking through to her files as Satya watches. She looks slightly irritated, probably because much of Sombra’s equipment, from her invisibility to the screens she’s using right now, are quite blatantly stolen Vishkar hard-light technology (the translocator was from the talking gorilla, she hacked the blueprints of that chronal thing he made for the annoying Brit and quite ingeniously redesigned them, if she does say so herself). She seems about to say something, but just then Sombra finds the files she was looking for, pulling them up. “Look through them as you wish, I’m sure you know your way around this sort of screen.”

  Satya looks at her. Just for one second, and Sombra’s not sure what the other’s trying to read from her face before Satya turns back to the screen and tentatively touches a finger to it. She’s a fast reader, Sombra can tell from how quickly she’s flipping through them - files directly ripped from the company computers, newspaper reports and pictures put next to each other that line up in highly suspicious ways, reports of what the corporation has told Satya to do and what papers to get, but then the part she doubted Satya had known, added parts of what exactly the company intended to do with those files.

  It’s damning, and Sombra can see Satya’s life falling down around her pretty face.

  She gets to the last file, and Satya pauses, for another long second, eyes moving across the screen, before slowly removing her finger from it and dropping her head into her hands. One look had obviously been enough. Sombra jabs a finger at it, a “missing” financial report clearly showing the Vishkar executives spending money that was supposed to go to the Rio housing facilities on a luxury jet.

  “You see, Satya? Vishkar was lying to you all along.”

  Satya doesn’t move. Or speak. Or cry. Sombra is not actually sure she’s breathing.

  She’s quiet for a very long time.

  It makes Sombra nervous, being here for this long. It’s risky. Whenever Sombra goes to make new friends, they don’t shut down. They snark, they scowl, they plead, they try and act superior, and she loves it. But Satya is silent, processing what Sombra has shown her, and Sombra, for reasons unknown to even herself, decides to wait.

  Finally, as Sombra watches, Satya stands up and walks over to a counter where a blue bag is sitting. She reaches inside the bag, and takes out two things - an extremely official-looking Vishkar license and a cellphone. Calmly and without saying anything, she proceeds to drop the license on the floor and crush it with the heel of her boot. Sombra nearly jumps from loud cracking noise, as Satya methodically sweeps the pieces into a corner with said boot and picks up the cellphone.

  “Hello?” She sounds far more put together then Sombra thinks she would in this sort of situation. “Yes, it’s Satya. I thought I should inform you that I’m feeling very sick right now, so I won’t be able to attend tonight’s meeting…….No, no, it’s alright, I just need some more rest. Mm-hmm…...Thank you for your concern. Goodbye.”

  The cellphone drops on the counter, and Satya turns back around. Sombra looks at her.

  “You’re not going to tell them I’m here?”

  Satya’s hand tightens into a fist. She’s angry, Sombra realizes, not broken or whatever stupid trope one would usually expect. Angry enough that tears are beginning to leak from the sides of her eyes – not noticeably, but they’re there. Sombra thinks she looks very pretty crying, but also decides that this is not the time to mention so. “I trust you more than….than I trust them, at the moment.”

  Sombra stays quiet, as Satya walks over the the window. She’s pacing now, around the room. The files are still pulled up over the table, floating there, winking, purple little puzzle pieces that line up to make something terrible.

  “We were supposed to be doing good.” she mutters, each word clipped, teeth sounding clenched. She whirls around to face Sombra, turning her gaze on her. Sombra flinches involuntarily. She is not one easily scared, and Satya’s anger is not that outwardly expressed. But her eyes have a silent, terrifying intensity.

  “Why are you showing me these things?” she asks, boring holes in Sombra’s eyes with her own. “What do you want from me?” That’s another similarity, Sombra thinks, because from the tone in Satya’s voice she’s asked that question many times, albeit probably with a different tone of voice. Everyone always wants something from you, when you’re good.

  Sombra doesn’t smile, like she usually would. But business is business. “I’m publishing them, see. I dislike Vishkar as much as you probably do now - and you probably have more puzzle pieces than me. But these’ll get you thrown in prison too, most likely. All I want is a favor, every so often, if I need it, and then I’ll wipe your name and incriminating info from the files when I publish them.”

  Usually, when she makes these sort of offers, the person hesitates. She’s had people refuse or try to take her out then and there, thinking prison is better than being beholden to an (in their minds) insane hacker. Satya does not hesitate.

  “Fine.”

  Sombra raises an eyebrow at her. “Eager, are we?”

  “I want to make the world a better place. That is all. I cannot do so from in prison, but I can out of it, and for that I can afford a few favors to you - especially as you are the one opening my eyes to reality in the first place. I do not think you are a bad person, and I doubt you’ll ask me to do anything too terrible.”

 That deserves a slight laugh. “Oh, now there’s a first! You should hear what other people have called me in the past. So, you will leave?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, no need to give me contact information. I’m sure I can find you.” Satya doesn’t appear to find that amusing, sadly, already pulling out a laptop. Sombra closes her screens, standing there. She’s quite tempted to ask Satya what exactly she intends to do now. But it’s getting light, now, and she’s already been here far, far too long. She’s about to melt away into the shadows, but then Satya, still looking at her laptop screen, speaks.

  “What should I refer to you as?”

  “Pardon?”

  “If we’re going to be working together in some form, I would like to know what to call you.”

  Sombra shouldn’t tell her.

  “Sombra.” Then she vanishes.

  -------------------

  Sombra gets out of the building, no problem, as expected. But she can’t forget those eyes of Satya’s, so brightly intense even right after watching her world fall down around her. Though, to be fair, Sombra doubts the woman suspected nothing even before the files. She’s a smart one.

  She edits the online copy of the files on her plane ride home, the one set to be sent mysteriously to several top reporters with instructions to publish as soon as possible - as promised, taking out all references to Symmetra or Satya Vaswani. It’s not difficult, there’s not really that much. Just enough to be threatening.

 Her hard copy in the file cabinet, with the incriminating info, is what she spends four hours staring at. It’s irrational, she knows. Satya could be useful. She should keep her leverage.

  She can’t stop thinking about those eyes, though.

  All Sombra has ever wanted was control. But Satya…...Satya wants to do good, so, so badly. If someone ever got into this apartment…..

  She glances at her computer. She hacked Satya’s laptop, of course, and her recent browsing history is running through the screen. Satya must have opened two tabs before she went to sleep. One was a normal search for the word sombra. The other was a search, in a private, untraceable browser, for “overwatch recall”.

  Sombra burns the files.

[terabitweb]

Original Post from SC Magazine Author: Victor M. Thomas

It starts out innocuously enough when an important-looking email comes in to a company employee. The sender’s email address is that of the company’s CEO, claiming that a payment needs to be made to a client or vendor immediately.

The email, which contains some sense of urgency, tells the employee to wire transfer an amount of money, perhaps $50,000 or more, to a specific company or bank account. The reasons vary but follow a common theme: A vendor has a new bank account and prior payments to that vendor failed. The company is “late” on its payments and a purchase needs to be made for necessary products or services. Whatever the purpose, the CEO does not have the time to go through normal check-request procedures and requires a quick response.

Often these requests are made when the CEO is out of town (the CEO’s or company’s own social media accounts might have mentioned he or she is at a conference or traveling on business — attackers have a lot of ways to determine when an executive is traveling) and confirmation might be difficult. So, in response to an email that looks like it comes from the CEO, the company employee immediately processes the check request and sends the wire transfer. The underlying concern for the employee is that if they do not process the request, their job could be in danger.

Poof. A relatively untraceable wire payment was just made to cyberthieves who just pulled off a quick scam by playing on the emotions, worries and goodwill of an unsuspecting company employee. The company was just victimized by a CEO fraud email attack, also known in law enforcement circles as a business email compromise (BEC) attack.

It could never happen to us in our business, say many executives. Hogwash.

It can and it does happen every day and it likely will continue to happen inside businesses for as long as cyberthieves play their emotion-throttled games with unsuspecting victims within companies where adequate training, policies, and procedures are lacking.

The FBI has been tracking these kinds of business email fraud attacks since 2013 and reports that companies have been victimized in every state and in more than 100 countries around the world, according to the agency. These crimes have happened to nonprofits, Fortune 500 corporations, churches, school systems and other businesses.

The global losses in 2018 alone are expected to exceed $9 billion from these crimes, according to a recent analysis from one cybersecurity vendor. That is up from $5 billion in such losses that were predicted by the FBI for 2017, and nearly triple the estimated $3.1 billion in global losses that were seen in 2016.

So, what is the root of the problem and how can it be curtailed or stopped?

“This is not a technology attack; it’s a psychological attack,” says Lance Spitzner, director of SANS security awareness at the SANS Institute, a security research and education group. The methods for stopping the attacks remain the same as they have since they began, says Spitzner: Start by training employees to view all suspicious emails, especially those with a rushed or emergency tone and unusual requests, as fake emails that are trying to steal money from the company.

Essentially, he says, employees need to be taught about the clues and indicators that point to email fraud attacks and then to always follow established procedures in response, such as verbally check with the CEO or other senior staffer to confirm that they sent the request.

Lance Spitzner, director, SANS security awareness, SANS Institute

While this type of attack is often called “CEO Fraud,” it could refer to any senior executive who is being impersonated by the attacker in order to get a lower-level staffer to take a specific action. Sometimes the action itself is not sending money; it could be a request to unlock a door that is normally locked (creating a physical breach vulnerability) or perhaps sending employees’ personal information, such as W2 tax documents or pay stubs, to a non-company email address in order to steal employees’ identities.

The employees must be trained carefully not to give in to emotions under stress when the resourceful and convincing thieves try to get them to respond by sending money, no matter what the threats or pleas are from the attackers, says Spitzner. “Their level of commitment to withstand the attacks rivals that of the guys who hold nuclear codes,” he says.

Establish codes

Clear policies and procedures are necessary for employees to use in order to confirm a request that seems unusual or perhaps sets off pre-determined policy alarms are triggered, experts agree. However, for these policies and procedures to be effective, it is essential that the senior executives who might be spoofed in the malicious emails — the CEO, president, CFO or other senior executives — agree to respond if an employee is doing their due diligence and requesting that the executive confirm a request made by email or text message, says Joseph Blankenship, principal analyst, at Cambridge, Mass-based Forrester Research. Companies must foster a work environment where no worker will be criticized, hassled or challenged when they inquire about such messages.

“People are often scared to challenge the CEO” by making such direct inquiries, which is what the cybercriminals hope will occur, he says.

One way to battle attackers is to establish clear and concise code words or phrases that can be used by the real CEO or other senior executive to authenticate his or her identity in an emergency. If the established code words are not known and repeated exactly by the attackers, then the employee can have a strong indication the email request is fake and they can reject it without concern about being fired for not following orders, says Christian Christiansen, an IT security analyst with Hurwitz & Associates of Needham, Mass.

Christian Christiansen, IT security analyst, Hurwitz & Associates

“It seems like CEO fraud is just the phishing attack that keeps on taking via wire fraud,” says Christiansen. “There are many solutions, even some that are tech-free, but people seem to mistakenly continue trusting email.”

That is where using secret codes, such as a few words in a pattern or specific statements about any topics that are known only to the real CEO and their employees, can be particularly effective to authenticate an email sender, he says. Also important are creating and maintaining financial transaction procedures that say that no wire transfers can be initiated solely by one person, regardless of who that single individual is. Instead, controls should be added so that all such transfers require a second or third person to authorize them over a certain amount, or if the money is being sent outside the United States, says Christiansen.

Similar controls should also be placed on corporate credit cards to prevent employees from having to be placed in these situations where they must make judgment calls during such attacks, he says.

Today’s attacks feature the same hallmarks as previous incidents, with the attackers conducting a wide range of basic research on the CEO using internet searches, often revealing travel plans, hobbies, favorite sports teams and other information the attackers use to try to bluff company employees and get them to think they are the person they are pretending to be. While companies strive to provide transparency about their organizations, attackers use this data to build more effective attacks.

Elevated privileges

While employee training for scenarios like these is critical, security teams need to remember to look at the company’s email traffic carefully so they can flag or spot any suspicious behaviors, particularly involving workers who are in the accounting, accounts receivable or other sensitive departments, he says. Instead of simply accepting emails from all domains, consider blocking suspicious ones from places where your company does not do business, Christiansen says.

“[For] people who have higher levels of financial access to your systems, you want to look and monitor those people pretty closely, people with elevated levels of privilege,” says Christiansen. “Often there can be coercion by attackers, or [attackers] can buy them drinks at a bar and ask about the company and its executives.”

Attempts to compromise corporate employees do not only focus on high-level executives with access to company secrets; systems administrators with privileged access to servers are often targets because their login credentials provide attackers with access to move through systems laterally without raising red flags. A compromised email administrator’s credentials, for example, could provide access to legitimate email accounts, making CEO fraud appear that much more legitimate.

Of course, companies must ensure that other basic but often neglected procedures are conducted, such as patching all desktop and laptop computer systems and related business infrastructure to protect them from succumbing to a wide range of security vulnerabilities. While it might seem easy to point to patching as a best practice, network administrators will tell you that before patches are moved to production systems, the IT team must ensure that the patch will not break some other system software. That time between delivery of the patch and how long it takes to verify it won’t break other applications often can be the difference between identifying a vulnerability and falling victim to it.

Another recommendation is never to call the phone number provided with a suspicious message. If employees want to reach the person requesting an unusual wire transfer or other action, they only should call the individual’s authenticated phone numbers to confirm the email’s request. Otherwise, they might end up calling a phone number being used by the cyberthieves themselves as part of the scam.

Use a holistic approach

Forrester’s Blankenship recommends using a holistic approach to battling CEO fraud email attacks, including knowing and recognizing the threats, stopping or flagging suspicious messages and effectively educating employees on how to circumvent such attacks.

Email filtering is often not effective enough on its own because the attackers usually mask their exploits and make them quite difficult to detect and filter out, says Blankenship.

What email filtering can do, however, is detect known spam and commodity phishing emails that have been reported or detected by others and stop them cold, he says. “What’s missing is the ability to detect suspicious emails or make targets aware that an email or other communication may be fraudulent. Some vendors are using machine learning and artificial intelligence to detect these, but the technology isn’t perfect yet and most businesses are not employing it.”

Joseph Blankenship, principal analyst, Forrester Research

Ultimately, because the known detection methods today are not foolproof, it is up to the email’s recipient to decide if a suspicious email is fraudulent or not, he adds. That can create its own conundrum: “Smart attackers will research their targets ahead of time and will work to gain trust before actually asking the target user to do something.”

To fight clever attackers, recipients must verify that incoming emails are real before taking any actions requested by the message, which is not easy to do during a busy and stressful work day, says Blankenship. “It’s up to security professionals to make sure their users and executives have the tools they need to defend themselves. Leaving it solely up to the user is doomed to fail.”

Depending on the size of the company and its internal IT organization, these needs can produce their own challenges because threat controls and training might not be available, he says. “Unfortunately, in a lot of these cases, these are typically mid-market or SMB companies, so they don’t have a big IT team fighting for them.”

In such cases, companies can subscribe to an ongoing security service for help, especially if they can provide real-time threat feedback, he notes. Another effective practice is to conduct regular procedural drills for employees so they can learn how to respond properly and securely to incoming “bait” emails that purport to be from the CEO or other executives.

One complication today is that since business email compromise attacks have persisted for years, plenty of data from past attacks is out on the internet and is available to be reused by today’s bad actors, says Blankenship. “All that data is floating around out there, so names and data are available. It becomes that much easier for a criminal to use that for their own means.”

Protecting company information

In the end, everything companies do to fight CEO fraud/BEC attacks is about protecting their businesses, employees and their operations, says James Pooley, a trial lawyer in Menlo Park, Calif., who specializes in trade secret and patent litigation.

Training employees to react to probing emails that come in with suspicious messages is one of the things he speaks about often with executives inside companies as they work to safeguard their IT systems.

One tactic he recommends is to set up carefully crafted protocols ahead of time so that incoming suspicious emails can be halted early in the process, says Poole. The protocols should include specific rules about any interactions that might come directly from the company’s CEO and other high-ranking executives, such as if an executive asks for money to be sent using specific instructions that might deviate from the norm.

Underscoring the need for code words to authenticate an instruction, Pools says the protocols might include “you will only get messages from me on these kinds of issues with this specific password or marker that can’t come in from the outside.”

Some new data loss prevention tools are using artificial intelligence (AI) to help weed out these kinds of attacks from cybercriminals, he added. “They are using AI that analyzes the nature of the communications themselves in ways that are far more sophisticated than just looking for words that match filtering lists. AI is really the way forward.”

So, will future CEO fraud email attacks ever be completely blocked? Not likely, says Poole. “If an outcome is affected by human behavior, you can’t 100 percent prevent errors by people. All you can do is try to react.”

The email fraud attacks “play on the fact that we are very busy and we don’t stop to question something that on its face has markers of plausibility,” says Poole. “Life is very fast these days, including inside the corporate environment, and people need to get things done now.”

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Go to Source Author: Victor M. Thomas CEO fraud: It’s human nature Original Post from SC Magazine Author: Victor M. Thomas It starts out innocuously enough when an important-looking…