322 Far Future Ch. 32 – Sharkey’s Machine, Part Two (1/2)

It was a very subtle psychic pressure, tilted towards using the internet for positive purposes. It also exerted pressure away from Artificial Intelligence, as vacuum circuits relied more heavily on human interaction, which in turn developed human minds and souls as they worked and interfaced with them. With the constant breaks within the circuits, no true AI could actually manifest... but linked to a human mind, great things could happen, where the mind could not be overwhelmed by the machine.

This was the environment our Goldilocks crew was working in, and they were having a blast.

In terms of programming languages and skills, they were naturally lagging behind the Mechanists, who were using some TL 10 stuff for normal stuff that had been invented millennia ago, and never really updated. The higher-ranked stuff almost none of them could employ properly, and so they didn't bother to.

The kids were going whole hog into improving themselves. The advance schema and what they had to be able to do with their meaty psi-boosted brains was right in front of them, and all they had to do was get to it.

An Intellect Mark sure helped, too.

They broke into all the surveillance cams for the Juris and Traffic control in the area, and slaved the feeds into a common database for our usage. The ability to turn TC on and off for our vehicles was a nice boon we made happy use of when needed. Blueprints were downloaded for buildings, mock-ups designed, and tiny little spybots sent in to survey the ground and see what tricks were in place.

Goldilocks who wanted to get into a fight were drone pilots, backing up the ground forces while combining surveillance and scouting functions. Drones were naturally first targets in fights, and there were plenty of electrical-based attacks which could take them out quickly, Everybody loathed them, so everybody who could shot at them. Since that was better than shooting at the living, that was fine.

A wonderful thing about bloks is that they make great headquarters, so naturally Sharkey was based in one, which he controlled pretty much outright. He had a good addict base there, bribed anyone connected to the government, and could basically do what he pleased.

He was also based on Floor 34, which was pretty much the same as every other floor in a blok. Oh, he had up a couple additional walls and barricades, but duplicating the layout and postings of the guards was simplicity itself.

Since they didn't know the layout of the rooms he had co-opted for himself and his personal crew, my students did ask me to scout those out.

It wasn't very hard with my Tremblesense, as I could survey an area for sixty feet around me, meaning at least three stories. That was good, because he'd made some very illegal blok mods, connecting three floors of apartments together with internal stairs and poles for escape options, and building additional internal hallways across corridors that were supposed to extend to the outer walls, establishing more layers of protection between himself and outside attacks.

I found his bolt-holes to floors 36 and 32, and his dropchutes through windows on the outer walls, obviously the reason why he hadn't taken the upper floors away from some of the wealthier people living there. I mapped it all, fed it into their mock-ups, and they put together a real-world semblance, to the extent of making our own illegal connections between an uninhabited corner section of floors 154 to 156, and they began to run through the assault.

After fifty-some drills, the assault team, swapping off with the defender team, finally made it to him. Nobody was happy when I triggered the demolition charges in the walls and covered everyone with red confetti with his suicide gambit, and they had to rework their assault plan to take out the bombs, too. More swapping off assault and defender teams happened, until everyone could walk the place in their sleep, knew all the defensive chokepoints, what they needed to get past them, who and what to kill and destroy, alternate methods of entry and flanking, and all the scenarios involved.

The kids were good. Lots of vids told them what they had to achieve, real-world ex-troopers backed them up and supplied them with realistic tactics, and a couple officers pointed out the strategy it was best to use to take out his vassal gangs, as the amount of manpower he had to draw on was enormous. He was drawing from a population of three different bloks he either controlled outright or had total influence over, and the businesses that existed in the areas around them.

Which naturally meant the kids had to expand the scope of their intel gathering. All pumped up to take out his HQ, when we added in the external elements and having to fight their way up to his base, everyone died, every time.

That definitely cooled their juices, and they realized they had to get rid of his external forces, or at the very least convince them they'd have better places to be than ending up on the end of a mindclaw.

So, intelligence-gathering went into effect. The Goldilocks set up an op where they connected the Quanta to his local cybernet, and promptly began to infiltrate everything. The feely-good viruses they came up with for his hackers were hilarious, smacking on their empathic centers and playing up their resentment for their bosses subliminally, so they didn't bother reporting 'a few bugs' they might have seen and thought they expunged, while our coders, who actually knew the code, added on to it and around it.

I had to personally go in and break their TL6 encryption; basically the whole crew watched in awe at how I was attacking the structure of the coding, widening miniscule gaps and inserting in new code to infiltrate everything, spitting out four different coding languages and thought-firing machine language blurbs out into their systems, which were brought in by bored Sharks and began to link up within their system. Digital codes cross-patterned into lesser codes reformed when downloaded, linked up as they were shared across systems, and became infiltration programs that soon cracked it wide open for my people.

It had taken me six months to hit my 28 base Intellect and crack open that second thoughtstream. Once I did, I could indulge in full-time immersion in the Boole and the Quanta, coding and programming to my heart's delight, the logic center of my brain going ga-ga over all the data analysis I could do. I was now aiming for a 32, where I'd have four streams, and could engage in research analytics with the third while the fourth was in constant management and control.

My Wisdom and Charisma streams from hitting 30 in each were manipulating stocks and gambling, and running Markspace, respectively. Hitting a goldweight in profit a day was my goal with Wisdom, and I was very close to that, and soon would be surpassing it and keeping going. I had a lot of expenditures, but outfoxing TL 10 computers and programming, reading trends ahead of them, and stuffing Sense Motive checks at 50 down the throats of gamblers using statistical programs was very satisfying.

Yeah, I sucked a lot of bandwidth doing all that. Happily, my memory capacity was effectively infinite, since I was hooked into the Akasha and could effectively dump none-vital but important information there to be retrieved and reviewed later, leaving my brain packed with detailed important information and immediate experience/memory, while reams of knowledge and data that was not essential to everyday life was in my own akashic annex for me to play with.