Chapter 509 - Far Future Ch. 219– Cyberspace Shenanigans (1/2)

I'd watched many cyberpathers go diving, and of course had no problems doing the tech side of things myself, as I'd invented the whole Goldilocking shtick with the gold in my hair.

Scarletlocking didn't sound right, after all.

Still, that is very different from actually interacting with programming on the psionic level, being able to reach out and poke electrons this way and that. While I didn't do much hacking due to time constraints and the constant connection required, I had kept up on all the programming, my Hacking Mastery stayed at /5, and I both contributed to the array of techniques the Goldilocks used and used them myself when I was in an area with an open Boole for playing around in.

The Mekkers would've cringed at how fast I could crack a basic Boole and head down into the understructure of the programming. While the dense core programming of the Boole was always at 15+, the secondary stuff was basically permeable to me now.

Just so the kids could experience 14 Ranks at work, I had made a habit of Boole-diving whenever I was around one, be it a city, space station, or ship. I wasn't really any better than any of my kids with an appropriate Talent, but I could understand things about the programming they couldn't, and so bypass stuff they couldn't... while the stuff they could go through they could do so much faster than I could.

Now the cyberpathers got to watch me wielding electrokinesis at their level, and go through this system with the touch of a Fourteen and some insane Mental Stats. They weren't shy about advising I do this or that, either, and I wasn't hesitant about doing it, either.

Time dilation is a big thing once you go into the dataverse, but even so they were gasping as I slid through the systems, spinning out a plot of the hardware and software, parsing it out for them to take apart even further as I skipped past verification points and security checks, touching and reprogramming several of them in passing deftly, arranging modifications to existing systems to support my suborning of the systems here.

I paused as I felt the organic touches to the monitoring feeds touching back from the system. While they weren't using brainboxes here, they were at the far end, probably a scrubbed cyberpath pslaved to the job. Voids wouldn't have any problems finding volunteers for that duty.

Since nobody dared to use actual AI, brainboxed humans were the only alternative if you wanted living interaction with computer networks, and cyberpaths were at once the most desired and most despised. No cyborg could interact with systems the way a cyberpath could, regardless of how advanced your hardware was, or how much of your brain you replaced.

These systems were being monitored by a psi-active entity at the far end.

How wonderful! This brainslave was now lazy as all heck, and wasn't using security protocols properly. He was directly manipulating the coding to allow himself to pass obstructions in his own custom way, i.e. he had given himself a psionic backdoor to the coding.

Replicating that touch was far from impossible, it was just an energy signature. Once I had it, it was only replicating his tactics, and then bouncing them back at him... with adjustments.

Giving a brain in a box a virus wasn't actually all that difficult. After all, the best way to purge a virus was to disconnect the hardware, and brainboxes had problems doing that by themselves. If you could get past their security and nix any alarms, they were basically helpless.

Efficiency over absolute security, I simply started feeding this distant brain coding replies and data with his own energy signature on it, like his own thoughts coming back to him. The data had what he wanted, but was layered with algorithms that only a post-Ten would register as wrong. In remarkably little time I was inside his psi-walls, and rewriting parts of his mental processes from the distance.

Two minutes of real time later he extended a cyberfeeler out in a certain pattern, I latched on, and I was inside the brain, straddling the system without actually needing to ride it.

The hackers watching hissed at what I'd done. It was a combination of psicraft, psychology, programming, and artful cryptography that had all the nerds weeping in admiration for the pure elegance of it all... and wincing when they realized the same thing could be done to them if their mental discipline wasn't up to snuff.

Getting up to snuff against a Rantha could be rather difficult, and this pslaved brain, scrubbed free of personality and soul, certainly didn't have the means.

It wasn't difficult to get schematics of his entire purview of authority thereafter, a combination of getting downloaded Bob the Brain's entire repetitive tasks, along with his knowledge of the network I encouraged him to give me. Since he was doing data dumps psychically instead of physically, there was no strain or stress on the system to be tracked.

Yeah, a pure hacker would have been caught. A pre-Ten cyberpath probably couldn't have done this. But once I was in with the right tool, this millennia-old security design revealed its weakness.

In truth, it was damn hard to keep post-Tens out of stuff, as tech is static, and people evolve and adapt in real time. Add in psionics that can affect the energy and the hardware as well as the software, and you have a nightmare for information security, which can generally only be fought by another active party on station and watching for what you are doing... or not staying connected to the Boole.

There was certainly a watcher for the watchers, but I was keeping this completely at the psychic level... and that tiny little spark of hate and defiance from the brain, barely aware of what he had been turned into, was something that made sure that Bob wasn't going to be taking the initiative to inquire if something was wrong as his thoughts wandered over the scope of his duties, the machines he had access to, their locations in cyberspace and reality, security programs, technology interfaces, layouts and systems across a huge chunk of the planet, and ways to reach out and touch them.

There were systems he didn't have clearance to access... which didn't mean he couldn't do so, only he had imperatives that he couldn't defy to leave them alone.

Me using him as a puppet and doing the breaking while he was totally unaware of it? That was something completely different.