Chapter 3: Smoke & Mirrors
Prologue:
Neo-G stretched in her over-stuffed high back chair, it was late in the night, and she has been working on planting and manipulating information since lunch. The massive console was strewn with empty cans of energy drinks, and hollow foil-lined wrappers of protein bars, chips, and various kinds of her favorite candies. It was eerie being alone in the command center, but she had work to do and main-frames to hack. Shadow has given her everything she wished, the latest workstations maxed out to capacity with 4-way SLI of the bleeding edge of graphics cards to handle the thousands of processes and data threads the 12 CPU cores can not, and storing all relevant data in the racks of data-farm servers behind the giant concave main screen. She continued to type as she fished for an opening, the FBI seal displayed on her 27 inch terminal screen in a window beside several other command line windows where her custom attack programs ran. The lines of code scrolled across the program's output windows, a chibi anime character animated like it was cracking a safe with a lock-pick and stethoscope. She felt proud of her creations, at least as much as the next hacker can to a piece of software.
She lived for the thrill of finding an exploit in a server's code or a back-door through a firewall. Before she was a part of Shadow's crew and even before she worked for War Eagle, she scraped by with what she could find, taking 5 year old junk computers, wiring them together, and slaving them to her cobbled together workstation built with the best she could salvage from the others. It wasn't pretty but did the job, at least until she accidentally hacked into War Eagle's casino's back-end servers, the ones no one should know about that handled the less then reputable dealings, and before she could figure out what she'd done a pair of black suits knocked on her flat's door. Lucky for her War Eagle can recognize talent when he sees it, and offered her to work for him or die. Her choice was obvious, and in time she stopped regretting it, and now under the command of a leader like Shadow she's glad she wasn't the stubborn type. Shadow was, in her opinion, very desirable. Attractive and mysterious, strong yet not uncaring, but he kept a healthy distance from her and acted like a wounded-heart type, having a troubled past she couldn't find, yet.
Her terminal beeped and the anime character jumped up and down as green code filled her attack program's windows, she was in, and now to bait Shadow's trap. "Alright, now let the games begin." she said to herself as a devious smile played across her fair face, and a devilish twinkle in her blue-grey eyes.
Neo-G stretched in her over-stuffed high back chair, it was late in the night, and she has been working on planting and manipulating information since lunch. The massive console was strewn with empty cans of energy drinks, and hollow foil-lined wrappers of protein bars, chips, and various kinds of her favorite candies. It was eerie being alone in the command center, but she had work to do and main-frames to hack. Shadow has given her everything she wished, the latest workstations maxed out to capacity with 4-way SLI of the bleeding edge of graphics cards to handle the thousands of processes and data threads the 12 CPU cores can not, and storing all relevant data in the racks of data-farm servers behind the giant concave main screen. She continued to type as she fished for an opening, the FBI seal displayed on her 27 inch terminal screen in a window beside several other command line windows where her custom attack programs ran. The lines of code scrolled across the program's output windows, a chibi anime character animated like it was cracking a safe with a lock-pick and stethoscope. She felt proud of her creations, at least as much as the next hacker can to a piece of software.
She lived for the thrill of finding an exploit in a server's code or a back-door through a firewall. Before she was a part of Shadow's crew and even before she worked for War Eagle, she scraped by with what she could find, taking 5 year old junk computers, wiring them together, and slaving them to her cobbled together workstation built with the best she could salvage from the others. It wasn't pretty but did the job, at least until she accidentally hacked into War Eagle's casino's back-end servers, the ones no one should know about that handled the less then reputable dealings, and before she could figure out what she'd done a pair of black suits knocked on her flat's door. Lucky for her War Eagle can recognize talent when he sees it, and offered her to work for him or die. Her choice was obvious, and in time she stopped regretting it, and now under the command of a leader like Shadow she's glad she wasn't the stubborn type. Shadow was, in her opinion, very desirable. Attractive and mysterious, strong yet not uncaring, but he kept a healthy distance from her and acted like a wounded-heart type, having a troubled past she couldn't find, yet.
Her terminal beeped and the anime character jumped up and down as green code filled her attack program's windows, she was in, and now to bait Shadow's trap. "Alright, now let the games begin." she said to herself as a devious smile played across her fair face, and a devilish twinkle in her blue-grey eyes.