As soon as I was finally dressed and had myself wheeled towards the future residence of the NADA, always followed by Wallace of course, I was greeted by two of the androids and half a dozen bots that had moved the crated NADA there, as well as my board. Of all my worldly possessions my board was the most, well the second most, all right the third most precious to me.

The most precious by a wide margin was actually the NADA, but that was so new that I was not yet accustomed to including it, and it was a close choice between the board and the cluster. If I would go from the pure monetary value or even the utility, the cluster would win 15 times out of 10, but the board enabled me to dive into cyberspace, and this ability alone made her priceless for me, even if my cranial board could manage the same, if to a lesser degree.

But for now, my Precious was wounded, injured to her core, and I had to heal her before we could soar again.

A harrumph from Wallace ripped me out of my reverie and I realized that I was petting the travel case of my board. I felt myself blush, again, and ordered the bots to carefully uncrate the NADA.

At the same time, I had one android place Precious on the table, before struggling to unlock the case with one hand. When Wallace attempted to help me I slapped his hand away out of reflex.

“Nobody touches Precious but me!”

Finally, I managed to open the case. The fuel cells were still at 83% power but I plugged in the external power supply regardless. Then I struggled again to connect the OPB cable to my data jack, deciding there and then that I would mirror the jacks on the left side of my head as soon as possible, before starting the boot sequence.

I wished that I could just use the Q-link to reinstall directly from the cluster but sadly the basic structure of Precious was already a bit over 17 months old, and at that time I had just cracked the resonance problem and had not yet had any idea how that would revolutionize my work.

So the Q-link was a plug-in component that was not accessible through the hard-burned Basic OS. I had upgraded her in every aspect, but the basic structure was becoming increasingly obsolescent. Especially now with me having a working NADA.

The same was true for my cranial board but that was decidedly newer and I included the Q-link from the ground up into the design.

If I had even dreamed of building a NADA even three months before I would have waited to design and build my skull tech until I had made it work, but despite going through the black lab's computer networks for more than half a year, I mostly ignored the NADA as it was so far from completion that in essence what everyone else had was a very, very expensive fabber and not an especially good fabber at that.

When I finally lowered myself to actually read the project summaries in a fit of boredom, I was quickly fascinated with the problem. I am still a bit embarrassed that it took me nearly two days to get to the solution. It was so glaringly obvious once I found it that I should have found it within a few minutes, an hour at max.

Of course, I can’t fault the scientists for trying to find a solution in vain, as they, unlike me, lacked the most important component. Without the Q-link, a NADA is not possible, and as far as I knew, I was the only one who had it.

With the Q-link it was comically easy. This was why I was the only person in the solar system who had a working NADA. That, of course, exemplified the problem should anybody learn about it. The fight for this technology would start wars, a fact I was sure of.

After the basic boot I transferred the custom OS I designed for her, and boy was I glad that I kept the copy I had stashed in the cluster up to date. That would save me four to five hours of adapting, but I still had to take at least three hours to install her.

It took just under three EB to install the blank OS and the drivers for the Q-Link. After that, she would download the other nine EB from the cluster and install all the tools I usually used. And at any time I would have to be ready to intervene if one of the installers hiccuped, something nobody could prevent.

Of course, I knew that one could get the OS for a professional board including all the tools a starting hacker needed at less than two EB, but please, that is off the shelf. Nobody would get more than 25:1 out of that setup, while Precious got me the unofficial record at 57.663:1.

And unlike the students who held the official record, I can use her for other things than virtual porn. This level of acceleration needed an ungodly amount of predictors, AI assistants, and optimizers up and running.

Additionally, the utilities needed to be compiled in a manner that made execution as fast as possible. If I would compile all I had optimized for size it would go down to 5.5 EB. Still more than the starter pack, but three-quarters of that would be my utilities, and these had never come even into the same zip code as the shelf.

I had spent nearly 30 virtual years programming them including the updates to the OS, which took me eight virtual years to get the first version just right. In real-time, I had spent nearly four months on the OS and six on the tools and upgrades.

While the installer was churning through the processes I controlled the work of the bots so far. For something so high-tech and valuable, the NADA was pretty simple in its structure. It basically consisted of four parts.

If the specialized nano fab was the heart the brain was for sure the control system.

The fab was only marginally different from what every other NADA in the world used, but the controller… the controller was the secret to why my NADA worked and none of the others did.

The third component, the tank for the substrate gel was more or less standard, but my energy pylons were different.

Instead of four distributed to the 2D corners, everyone else used I had 14 placed at all eight corners and the six planes of the tank. After I solved the resolution and control issue via Q-links I designed the pylons to additionally serve as a nav system. That enabled me to get tolerances in the 100 picometer range. That meant I could literally build things from the atom up.

The bots had already installed the tank, as well as the lower pylons, and were installing the side plane pylons. My superficial inspection found no fault, so I tackled the next point on my list.

For the next two hours, I was busy ordering all kinds of stuff, while I learned that the fixers on the East Coast were in no way easier to work with than the ones on the West Coast. Greedy jerks, all of them, but I got most of what I needed.

First of all, I managed to get five Pulse IIIs. So even if Mia ruined something we should be covered, and I did not pay more than 30% over the legal market.

I also got a discrete line for raw materials, and this introduction cost me only $50k.

It got a bit harder getting replacements for the Wiltons, but finally, I got a surprisingly good deal on four brand new Yasoshi f33 GAMMA fusactors that were considerably more powerful than what we had now.

Apparently, it was en vogue to diss Japanese companies here in the USA at the moment or something like that.

Personally, I did not understand the problem, as the Yasoshi’s may not have been up to the qualities of Simpson & Proctor but they were a good second choice, better than anything produced in the US, and getting them for 45% of the normal price… we just had to somehow live with six times the electric generation than before.

Lastly, as I had dreaded, the industrial fabber was expensive. The dang thing cost more at $12 million than the four fusactors at $7 million combined. Although it did have some advantages, as it combined the chip-fabber, the carbon extruder, and the winding machine in addition to quite a few other options.

If I did not have the NADA it would be a veritable godsend, and grudgingly I conceded that the price was pretty reasonable for the versatility it offered. While I was at it I finished the 20 million by getting two new algae tanks and a new water purifier.

Finally Precious was ready, and I explained to Wallace that I would be unresponsive for some time, before diving into cyberspace at last.

It took only a moment for the alternate reality to form around me, and I relaxed a tension I was not aware I had. I was finally home again. Here nobody would call me runt, pimp, pipsqueak, freak, or whatever they dredged out of the cesspool they call mind.

Nobody here would gang up to ambush me, nobody would steal whatever I have with me and most of all nobody here could see me as weak.

Here I was not Vivian DuClare, daughter of the infamous traitor Julian DuClare, nor Veronica Sinclair, not Red, and most certainly not Kitten.

Here I was Seraphim. My avatar was not the 151cm (or five feet nothing for those metrically challenged out there) small dwarf pure, no, to the cyberspace I presented a tall figure made of light with swirls of smoke-like shadows creating the illusion of contours.

Three pairs of majestic wings, made out of almost blinding light accented by the same black tendrils of shadows adorned my back.

Nobody could tell if my avatar was clothed or not as all features were only the shadows moving in random, but still intricate patterns over my body. Sometimes you could see them, other times not, they changed form and position.

It was known in the Abyss that I was female, but that was all.

I stretched my wings slowly and self-indulgently, and let my gaze flow over my mindscape.

Even after nearly a subjective century, I felt awe when I looked at the seemingly endless reaches of my mindscape. Prismatic colors swirled through the dark blue eternity, reminiscent of drug-induced fever dreams I have been told, accented by bursts of brilliant light and tendrils of abyssal dark. Originally only the colors and the light were present, and my avatar was an indescribable figure of pure light, but after I began working for Spectre I choose to accent my light with the shadows preferred by this most enigmatic hacker.

Many mundanes, nearly all of the Jokers, and even a few Kings questioned the value of the mindscape for a hacker. These benighted souls argue that most of the work is done by the machines, that the programs and utilities are the only things important, and of course the power of the originating machine.

Fools that they are they never understood how formal and scripted computers are. Without the unpredictable chaos of the Jack's mind, it is indeed just a point of who has the better utility and or the better machine to run. In this world, supercomputers like the cluster reign supreme, but even a low-level Jack can run circles around any of them, as the human mind shifts the patterns without logic or structure.

Still, that alone did not necessitate the mindscape, as uniform structures would lessen the load on the boards considerably, and the power of the used utilities was untouched by the mindscape, but it is the full mind, not just the conscious one that drives the might of the Jack.

Intuition, instincts, guts… all things that influence the performance, and these you can’t trick with uniform structures.

A Jack that gets his or her mindscape bent by the opposition has practically already lost. You lose your sync, your compression plummets and the opposition can play mind games with you while being able to directly attack your board.

No bot, no VI, not even a supercomputer is capable of that.

Ironically the subconscious also affects the avatar.

If you can’t convince yourself that yes, you really are protected your defense utilities are at best marginally effective.

If you can’t make yourself believe to 110% that the wet tissue your avatar has in its hands is actually a deadly attack utility, don’t even try to use it for anything other than cleaning your nose.

And if your avatar runs around in cyberspace with a marching band and a neon sign, even the most sophisticated stealth utilities would be worthless.

All because the subconscious has much more control over us than most of us believe.

That is the reason why defense utilities usually manifest as some sort of armor, shield, or rarely an energy barrier. Attack utilities routinely posed either as companions if they are bots or as weapons if not. And of course, I had to go into a stealth form to not unduly draw attention when I did not want it. Actually, a Jack who has only one stealth form is soon a dead Jack.

On the other hand, even a mystical Zen master would never exceed the maximum his utilities could bring, so regardless of how you convince yourself that what your avatar holds in his hands is a weapon, if the utility behind it is a scanner you won’t do any damage, and if your stealth utilities are subpar you will be detected.

With a last flex of my wings, I jumped up, and finally, I was flying again. To this day I can’t understand any Jack who has no flying form for his or her avatar. The dream to fly was ingrained into us humans since our ancestors climbed down from the trees, and we are finally able to soar on our own. It has been said that in some of the space-habitats there are areas where one can fly, but from what I found out, it is more of a gliding than real flying.

Here in cyberspace, on the other hand, flying is simply glorious. I can, somewhat, understand those that decide against a Jack and become Queens out of fear of CRS as that is an ugly way to go, but seriously even a Queen can’t come even close to this feeling. A diadem may be enough for some of the less powerful virtual reality games, that are sadly the only ones still being made, out there, with their reduced resolution, but even there, if you play a flying character, it is not the same. Believe me, I tried both ways.

I spent nearly an hour simply rejoicing at the feeling of the air rushing around me, of the gravity pulling me into a dive, of the g-forces of tight turns, releasing the pent-up stress of more than a week without virtual reality, but any playtime has to end. Of course in real-time, I only wasted around a minute, so it was nothing I could not afford, but I had work to do.

I connected my mindscape to the matrix, as the net was called by the geeks and nerds after several antique Sci-Fi sources, and my consciousness flowed into the glittering world of ones and zeros.

The NYC matrix was a reflection of the Big Apple at its greatest time. Titanic buildings that in reality were nothing more than rubble, a sea of lights, and an unbelievable number of bots.

Apparently, the Feds still took token supervision of the City, as I could see several obvious law enforcing utilities, but they were decidedly low level.

More dangerous were the several watchers from the corporations.

Especially the banks had the net swarmed with watchdogs, looking for the discretely embedded distinct markers that better security systems tagged anybody that enters their domain with.

Unless one had a good reason why to have said markers one was neck-deep in excrement if one of the dogs sniffs the marker.

That is one prime reason why the professionals only hacked better corporations after they gained much experience.

Without the patience to avoid these places until one had the experience, one would not get to be a professional.

There are, of course, ways around this security feature. Most simply used a disposable shell that they jettison as soon as the job is done, while others, including me, thought that we left too many traces in the shell.

Sure, it should be dissolved and untraceable but honestly, nobody should ever trust on should.

Instead, we used the vastly more challenging method of slicking. We balanced the incoming data to repel any marker, and still let in the environmental data we need.

This took way more concentration and experience than a discarded shell, but if done right it only left the information that something was in the system.

The third way was only done once as far as anybody knew.

Roughly six months ago, somebody hacked every single bank in North America without leaving any trace. It only was known that they were hacked because a substantial amount of accounts were suddenly closed out, and more than 3.7 trillion ITB were… diverted.

Even in the Abyss nobody had any idea how this phantom did it, much less who it could be.

The speculation ranged from aliens to a real AI. A few even thought it could be a human who did it, but they were in the minority.

At this time, though, I had other things to do, so I sped along the matrix until I found the node of Doc Schaeffer’s clinic.

Speeding in this instance meant sadly that I reduced my compression to 4:1, as anything higher would scream of combat diving, and attract attention.

Still, it took only a few seconds to reach my destination.

Of course, I could have used the backdoor access I created automatically, but I wanted to actually see how hard it would be to break in. With that in mind, I changed to my general stealth form, something I called my predator form.

From the outside, the only visible parts of me were faint distortions in the air, similar to an optical mirage. In addition, my avatar levitated above the ground, so there were neither steps nor wing flaps that my subconscious could interpret as broken stealth.

Behind the mindscape, my board activated an IP spoof that fooled the system that I was using one of its own computers and a combined pattern analyzer and simulator that enabled me to practically vanish into the background pattern of the data streams in the clinic net.

This should make it quite hard for the automatic systems to see me. Especially the pattern simulator depended on me really believing that I was nearly invisible and sneaking, or some random spike could trigger an alert.

The inside of the clinic net was… austere is the best description I could give. One look was all that was needed to know that it was a King that had designed and installed the network here, and a rabid detractor of Jacks at that.

Even a Queen would have taken the dangers of the mindscape into consideration and would have integrated at least marginal virtual environs that a Jack had to override, such causing at least some stress and difficulty, while at the same time making it harder to enter undetected.

As it was at this time, it was almost laughable. Instead of even a standard viron that somewhat depicted the clinic net, I was greeted by a purely digital representation. Wireframes of the different processing units including the name of the unit integrated into the frame, and streaming blobs of data that unmoving embody the programs running.

A handful of roving hunter ICE patrolled the higher-level units with half a dozen from the server patrolled the net as a whole.

Each of the higher units had at least one watcher ICE on the lookout for any deviation from the standard behavior, while most of the programs running had some low-level barricade ICE around it, standard DEP if I was right.

All that would be quite good security, in a world without Queens and Jacks that is.

Against Kings though with their pure external interface who only could run utilities from the OS, not to mention Jokers, who at best can run bought scripts and utilities it would be more than enough. But even Queens with their virtual reality hampered by the diadem would at best need 20 minutes to get all of it dismantled. 19 minutes and 59 seconds laughing followed by one second to actually breaking through.

Against a Jack… well the time laughing might be the same, but otherwise, no Jack who knew what he or she was doing would need a full second to raze the ICE.

I would seriously have to talk to Walker about this.

If his HQ was similarly protected there was a grave security risk in his organization.

On the other hand, statistically, there couldn’t have been more than four or five Jacks in NYC.

The number of Jacks in the whole system fluctuated around 11 thousand so it could be that it was not so critical a chinch as I thought.

At that moment a very evil thought shot through my mind.

What if the viron was created specifically this way to hide the actual protection? That would make a nasty surprise for any Jack laughing his or her ass off. While I designed such a viron in the back of my mind I looked for any indication that the designer here had done that.

My sniffers swarmed out, taking the forms of floating bloodhounds, hawks, and bats, flooding the different higher units, testing the ‘viron’ all the way.

At the same time, I manifested the readout of my pattern analyzer as a form similar to that of a weather radar display.

Any change in the viron that any reacting ICE would create would be displayed. In this way, I waited for 15 minutes.

When all my sniffers reported back in the negative, I was unsure if I should be disappointed or elevated. Remembering that it was friendly territory, I fell into disappointment. More stuff I had to work on it seemed, but at least it would be good training.

Next, I released my deep scan utilities, as a swarm of ghost-like apparitions. These I had instructed to search for any break in the data structure, without expecting much of a return.

With the lack of a viron, a Queen or a Jack would scarcely leave any trace behind, but it did cost me nothing, as these were run by the cluster without impeding my board in any way.

At the same time, I moved toward the medical database and looked into the logs.

I scanned explicitly for any discontinuities, or any holes, and let the deep scan of the cluster run a binary analysis.

Again I was not expecting much, so I was not surprised that I was able to find the manipulation, including the approximate date, but no other traces.

Just to be sure I let the cluster scan the database for other manipulations.

I was sure that as soon as the ghosts came back with a negative report I had narrowed the suspect list down to roughly 11k suspects, but I would never be able to weed them out any further.

That of course explained why I was so surprised that I actually got a trace and a pretty good one at that.

It took me a few seconds to comprehend the report I got.

I knew for sure that it had to be a Jack that planted the false data, as even a Queen could not have sneaked through the defenses without at least some form of manipulation that would have been visible on any halfway thorough inspection and should have triggered an alert months ago.

But here it was, in my virtual hands. Somehow my ghosts had found an IP trace.

I was, honestly dumbfounded. Anybody determined enough to get a data port and become a Jack is either dumb as a stone and such unable to hack anywhere without leaving a trace akin to a bulldozer in the forest or is capable enough to use the bare minimum of stealth, including IP spoofing.

Even then an IP trace is nearly impossible in a net without a viron.

One had to virtually engrave the trace into the net to leave a trace here.

The cluster had meanwhile finished with the database and revealed three other slight modifications. They all would increase the risk of developing CRS if acted upon, so any already nearly nonexistent chance of this being an accident vanished.

I waited until the last of the ghost reported back before I returned to my board, where I pondered over the situation.

I simply could not wrap my mind around the facts as I knew them. It took me the better part of an hour until I found a scenario that could fit the information.

An especially talented queen could have, however unlikely, bypassed the security of the clinic without disturbing the watchdogs.

At the same time a small glitch in the OS, network driver or the IP spoofer could have created the IP imprint in the buffer my ghost found it in.

Of course, I knew I was grasping at straws, but I simply could not find any other logical explanation. Shrugging my shoulders, an action that shrugged all six wings alongside my arms I decided to investigate the trace a bit further.

I fully expected to run into either a temporal IP or the starting point of a long series of bridges and was simply flabbergasted that instead, I found a permanent IP leading to the HQ of the Berardino family.

My already threadbare theory had just gotten translucent, and it was impossible to see a viable scenario in which the facts fit.

In the end, I decided I lacked information, and moved into the net again. This time I would not enter friendly territory but rather investigate an outright attack from the perpetrator's place, hopefully without them realizing I was there.

By entering the Berardino-net I was again surprised, as while I found a virtual environment here, it lacked in other areas.

Despite searching for nearly two hours the only countermeasures I found was a low-level gatekeeper bot playing a firewall on TV.

Oh, it certainly put up a good front, but anybody actually looking into it found quickly that it only pinged a possible intruder, without even receiving the return.

In this, it was comparable to dummy cameras that some cheap shops still used as a shoplifting deterrent.

Of course, I could not believe this and used every single tool in my arsenal to probe for surprises, but even when I tasked the cluster with a full-scale assault, protected through Q-link bridges, there was absolutely no reaction.

Finally, I accepted that somebody really messed up here and snuck in. The viron created an air of old money. Dark wood paneling, tasteful decoration, old-fashioned fixtures, and everything designed as a small mansion.

The different PU’s were represented as rooms, the net was the corridors, and the entrance was the gatekeeper.

It was manifested as a middle-aged uniformed guard including several weapons ranging from pepper spray to an antique revolver, but all that, and the walkie-talkie he carried were just for show.

One of the cluster's attack-bots practically danced in front of the gatekeeper, and it just walked around it on its patrol round.

The rest of the rooms made a decent impression, but all the programs running, all the bots, everything, did nothing, absolutely nothing else other than producing the illusion of activity.

After a bit of searching, and it was surprisingly easy, I found one database that was more than randomized junk. Instead, it contained several e-mails between a certain Giorgio Berardino and somebody called 3n1gM4.

The mails contained several voice prints of somebody, apparently Giorgio explaining his plan of secretly killing off most of the other bosses and then taking over.

The written parts showed a timeline of how the work was going, who was hacked now, and what 3n1gM4 had found where.

One of the files contained a list of cyber-surgeons that were bribed, how much they were paid and how they were ensured to remain silent.

I wished from the bottom of my heart that I could have believed all that, but while the database was encrypted, it took me less than a virtual minute to decrypt everything.

Oh, sure, I used the cluster for that, as a routine measure, but even the cluster needs between 15 and 20 real-time minutes to decrypt anything protected by standard off-the-shelf encryption tools.

No, everything here made it clear to me that somebody was doing a frame-up, but nothing I found gave me even a hint towards who could have done it.

To make sure of it I left the Berardino net and started a search on the darknet for the Berardinos. Lo and behold, I found the IP of their network, but somehow it was different from the one I found on the clinic net.

When I arrived there and started my standard pre-intrusion work I was presented with a completely different picture.

The viron was the same, so I concluded whoever created the false front had copied it, but the activity was, well it was there and it was real.

Instead of a gatekeeper it had several low-level white ICE watch dogs patrolling the ports of the router.

Nothing that would even incommode me, but real ICE nonetheless.

Further in I found no less than three different activity watchdogs, including a heuristic one.

Again, nothing that would slow down a somewhat competent Jack, but compared to the ersatz-net it was there.

I did not want to trigger an alert or leave any traces so I took my time and slowly moved into the mansion.

With an eye on my pattern scanner, I was somewhat relieved that they did not have a traffic randomizer running, as that would make the work of my pattern simulator so much harder.

Nothing I could not have dealt with, but one did not have to ask for punishment that is not necessary.

Tempted as I was I left nearly all the rooms alone as I did not think Walker would be amused if I accidentally started a gang war. Instead, I made my way as directly as possible to Giorgio Berardino’s private PC.

I was in luck and it was already up and running, negating the possibility that somebody could come in and be surprised at the running computer.

There I copied the e-mail archive and folders to the cluster and let it start decrypting them. I also copied any recording, Giorgio made on this machine. Finally, I wiped any traces that I was there and left carefully not disturbing the watchdogs.

As soon as I had retreated back to my board I queried the cluster about the decrypting process, getting the expected answer that it would take between one and two hours in real-time.

I thought about getting a good look at the other targets mentioned in the frame database but decided I would have to talk with Walker about it beforehand.

There was no doubt in my mind that it was a false flag operation but who was behind it and what exactly they wanted to achieve I had absolutely no idea.

I simply had nothing pointing to anybody and no idea how to get any hints. Well, not quite, I had one option left, but that would take a few hours to launch, and maybe what I already had was enough for the cluster to get at least the identity of the hacker, hopefully sparing me from using up a valuable favor.

In real-time I was in cyberspace for not even 20 minutes, even if it seemed like half a day to me and the bots would need at least another half hour to finish installing the pylons, meaning I had time to kill, so I began the design for the auto-surgeon.