Chapter 1: Hack Into The Patchwork, Pierce The Plan
"I needed to be able to end a fight before it even began. I wasn't there then, I am now."
-Aiden Pearce, The Fox
Well, always good to see that I've still got it. Would have prefered if I didn't have to see whilst running for my life from a dead woman, but hey, trial by fire and all that. It was good to see Garrus again, although I would've prefered it to be on better terms. Although, if not for him, I'd probably by lying in one of Omega's gutters, body stripped and desecrated, so maybe I should send a few thousand credits his way.
I guess I should explain a bit about my life for the past two years if I'm gonna start recording this log now. It all started when I bashed up that teleporter prototype Blume was working on, what I thought had been a rifle butt to the head was actually the trauma of having every bit of me broken down, accelerated twenty eight point six times the speed of light, and reassembled in another universe.
A lot to take in, I know. As luck would have it, I ended up in this shit-hole called Omega, place is teeming with crime and sin, oh and did I mention the aliens? Yeah, that was probably the biggest thing to wrap my head around, fuckin' aliens. But hey, in two years, you learn to accept stuff.
As it was, I had gone back to my old job using my profiler to hack into stuff and steal information. I had never 'upgraded' to an omni tool because, frankly, the interface gave me a headache and it was far too noticeable. It's a giant glowing orange gauntlet for fuck's sake.
But anyway, back to stealing info. I went around looking for any bits and pieces of anything really that could point to a way back home, experimental projects, already existing designs, nothing was safe from my grasp. This Extranet thing helped with that a lot, seeing as how you could get info on practically anything from it, if you know how to get around some security measures.
Honestly, when I first got here I was a bit… disappointed in their cyber-security. One man with no knowledge of any new systems, with only a DedSec modded smartphone could breach into Omega's core computers. From there, from there I found out everything.
Every dirty little secret that anyone on Omega, and even off Omega, might have had. That's when I found out about Cerberus. This big 'Pro-human' black organization. They did fucked up shit, let me tell you. Human experimentation, on children no less. Torture, illegal research. Hell, they sent squads of soldiers to die at the teeth of some giant worm with a fake distress beacon because they wanted to 'See how they would react.'
Needless to say they were soon at the top of my shit-list. So, I remotely hacked into their network via Omega's uplinks, rather lucky I found an outpost in range I guess, and started gathering secrets. Big secrets.
Now, I wasn't the blackmail type, so you know what I was gonna do? I was gonna steal everything they had, data, resources, cash, take it all and then give what was left to the council. Not just them, of course, I knew as well as anyone that the council didn't get shit done. But, they had to get a copy. So would Aria. So would every other important person in the world, from private organizations to news reporters.
What they did with it was their own choice, but by giving it out to all those people, I ensured it couldn't be deleted, it was a solid plan.
But now? Now that Humanity's 'Greatest hero' is back? Well, now I'm thinking we might not need a personal civil war. And you know why? Because now I was getting info about Human colonies vanishing. Poof, gone. And that rubbed me the wrong way.
I did some digging after my big escape, looked into Cerberus info. Something was important enough to bring Shepard back to life for, and I was gonna find out what that was. What I found, I wasn't happy with after finding.
This alien race nobody knew fuck all about, the Collectors, they were abducting Humans. For what, nobody knew, but it couldn't be anything good. That was way the Illusive Man had sent Shepard out, once more, into the galaxy. To gain a squad that could take down this new threat.
Perhaps I had done enough in my time here. I'd stopped lots of crime, along with Garrus. I'd stolen so many secrets, I could put away some of the biggest bads in the galaxy. But with a threat like the collectors looming in the distance? Well, now was no time to stop.
But the first step would be getting off this rock.
Aria didn't like me. That was a fact. And she liked it even less when I tried to leave. You might ask, why did she wanna keep me here? Well, because, if she kept me here than whenever I spilled the beans about her, she knew where I would be to crush my head in.
Of course, that kinda got in the way of my plans. Which was why I was currently running through the pathways of Omega firing my custom made handgun back at some quickly approaching Batarian and Turian thugs.
But let me talk about my gun first, alright? So, as I'm sure you know, most conventional guns work by shaving off a bit of metal from a block of it, and propelling it at high speeds into a target. This builds up heat, of course, which is why you have these thermal clip things that give you a preset number of shots.
But you know what I thought? I thought that if we already have limited ammo, might be a better idea to have something bigger than a BB. Which is where my gun comes in, and no, it isn't named. I designed it, along with some help from Garrus, off of my old 1911 and a newer, but still outdated, Zenith pistol.
Put them together and I had this relatively light, moderately sized, badass looking gun. With a magazine size of fourteen, and chambered for the powerful 45.-70 rifle round, I could punch through pretty much anything that got in my way. And before you ask, yes, that does include shields and biotic barriers.
Also before you ask, no, I don't know how.
But anyway, back to the chase. I had these four guys on me, three turians, one batarian, all firing Predator Mk1s at me while running. Now, let me tell you, being accurate while running isn't really a thing. But I guess that makes me a hypocrite since I was doing it too, having shot six bullets at them to try and slow them down, along with bringing up shield barriers and popping electric boxes.
Sadly, these guys had better armor for electricity than Blume ever did, and all that really happened was them getting stunned for a bit. But hey, in a chase, every little bit of ground you can gain helps. Speaking of gaining ground, up ahead were some conveniently placed boxes I could use to jump up to another level, chuck a grenade behind me after I got up, and the thugs chasing me would be stuck below. Hack into a partition's servos and make it block the way and lock was just a bit of insurance.
Speaking of all the hacking I've been doing, maybe I should explain that too. You see, back in Chicago I had gotten this set of viruses, worms, halts, and general hacks from a shadowy Black Hat group called DedSec, but of course, none of those worked in this new universe I found myself in.
So, what I had to do was build everything back from the ground up, I used the DedSec hacks along with some stuff from my phone proper as bases, and what little good stuff I could grab off some omni-tools to restore all my old 'powers.'
And of course I added a few new things to deal with pesky shields, and biotics, and guns. Yeah, I can break guns now. Pretty cool, if I do say so myself. Obviously the next step to all this was to up the 'power' of all my little hacks, and that took a bit longer to do.
But, thankfully, with all the 'new-age' tech just lying around in Omega, there was plenty I could do. Garrus told me later that I'd essentially made something of Mark 8 quality by stuffing lots of Mark 2 & 3 stuff into a phone. I'm pretty happy with that, honestly.
Anyway, at the end of all that I had about as much control over the city as I did Chicago, save for security cameras of which there seemed to be none, as well as getting a few new toys, and having the lot of them be better than before.
As more bullets pinged against a shield barrier I also remember that I've still not gotten, nor jerry rigged, a shield generator. I should really get on that. Ignoring the bullets that were bouncing off the electric barrier, a dove through some random maintenance hatchway and was soon lost to those chasing me.
It occurs to me as I sit here in my new base, which looks surprisingly like The Bunker, that perhaps I should pack up and leave, considering Garrus knew where this was, and he'd probably tell Shepard. Well, the plan was to leave anyway, no sense in delaying that by trying to find a new safehouse.
"Well, no time like the present," I muttered, spinning about in my chair to face one of my many monitors, this one had a list of every single coming and leaving spacecraft, the ones I could potentially take/buy my way onto were outlined in red.
Oh, now there's a nice one, I thought, taking a closer look at the current ship I was viewing. Had been abandoned for some years, nobody could get it, pretty good tech, but unassuming, and big enough to fit my set-up, and then some.
Perfect, far too perfect.
Which meant one of two things, I was really lucky, or Aria had taken another approach to capturing me. If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on the latter. Lucky for me, I don't think Aria quite knows the extent of my control over 'her' city.
It was time to give the Queen of Omega a little show.
The plan was simple, falsify some loading documents for one of the other ships I could have taken, hack into it's networks and systems, and then start the lift-off sequence remotely. This would draw Aria and her thugs off the ship that she had been so generous to provide, which I could then lockdown and load, and get away on.
And before you say anything about it taking forever to load all the crap I had; due to the wonderful power of Mass Effect Technology, I could basically drag all of it along with me, and what I couldn't, I could hire some people needing to make a quick buck.
With a smile on my lips, a fake pre-recorded farewell message sent to Aria, and quite a few taps on both my phone and keyboard, and boom, the plan was underway.
All of the technical work taken care of, I moved over to my armory, which I had amassed over the years, and begun grabbing whatever I'd like to have on my person.
My pistol was a must, obviously, along with it came my original silenced 1911. Along with those came an assault rifle I had gotten some time back, biometrically locked to myself, and myself only, modded with some new tech to punch through shields, barriers, blah blah blah, you get it by now I'm sure. After that came a few homemade grenades, some sticky bombs, and noise-makers. Surprisingly all still effective in their base form, for some reason current gen armor wasn't really explosion resistant, and even with radar most soldiers couldn't help but check out the 'old-timey' music coming from down a hall.
All of my gear grabbed I went through the process of downloading all the information in my network onto my person, a risky move but a necessary one, and then formatted all the old drives at my base. You know, the ones that weren't stored away in this 'new ship' of mine.
Everything finished I walked to my door, and turned off the lights of the complex for the last time.
Everything went as planned, surprisingly. Honestly, I'm not in the practice of underestimating my enemies, but perhaps I gave Aria a bit too much credit. Anyway, after all the checks needed to make sure there were no trackers, or bugs, or anything to sabotage the ship, I started the, probably illegally paid for, ship.
Honestly, Aria did know how to buy a trap ship, this thing had leather seat. Leather seats! I cannot express how major a thing that is, considering even luxury gunships (Yes, those are a thing) only had a metal frame and some shitty cushion for a chair.
As I relaxed in my new chair I opened up the ship's UI, quickly grimacing at the haptic interface and going through the process of emulating the controls via laptop, I began inputting all the necessary commands that would take this ship to the Citadel, which was of course the first step on my new plan.
The second step was siphoning tons of cash from multiple accounts held by crime bosses and important figures so as to afford a rather nice place to live on the Citadel Presidium. And then a bit more cash to make sure those transactions and my future lodgings wouldn't be on any kind of grid.
It's good to have one of the premiere information dealers in the galaxy owe you a favour, it really is.
_/|
Author's Notes: So, I've been forgetting these for the past two prologues, and perhaps my first true chapter is the proper place to put them. Anyway, as is fairly evident, this is a Mass Effect and Watch_Dogs crossover, and the first of it's kind that I've ever written.
While that might not fill some of you with confidence, and I understand why, I would like to reassure everyone that I will be doing my very best to write Aiden as befits him, and to make his adventures both interesting and logical.
Well, logical for Mass Effect mixed with Watch_Dogs, anyway. If any of you out there have suggestions for future adventures, ways to improve on characterization, little tidbits of information I might find interesting, or any kinds of requests; feel free to write a comment (Or a 'review' as Fanfiction likes to call them) and I'll do my best to make your dreams reality.
