.Hack//Heist
A .Hack fanfiction by Renfro Calhoun
Disclaimer: .Hack and attached characters and concepts are property of Bandai and CC. Original characters are mine; however, since even the characters I created aren't really that original - particularly the hard-boiled ex-cop - I suppose they exist in some weird limbo-like state of ownership. Or possibly on the moon. Ah, whatever.
Notes: Currently at some undisclosed amount of time (roughly a day) after the start of Mutation. Parentheses indicate thoughts. Oh, how I wish I'd thought up sword-chucks first...
Chapter XXII - Current Events
------------
*Kite has joined #Alias*
Topic is NOT set
Active users: BlackRose, Deisart
------------------
Welcome to #Alias!
------------------
Kite: Hello?
BlackRose: Hey, Kite!
Deisart: Good, everyone's here. All right, there's no real way to sugarcoat this; we've got bad news, and we've got really bad news.
Hiroshi cringed. Of all the things that could possibly have made this worse, just *seeing* that was near the top of the list.
Kite: What's the bad news?
Deisart: The bad news is, the files we got... weren't what they told us they were.
He blinked. "Huh?" (What does that mean?) he thought, translating his thoughts to the chatroom.
BlackRose: What were they?
Deisart: We were told this was accounting data. Long story short, the title of the first file was "Project Delphi."
Hiroshi froze, his eyes staring at the word 'Delphi'. He sucked in a sharp breath of air, his throat tightening.
Kite: Delphi??? That thing?
BlackRose: No way!
Kite: What did it say?
Deisart: Hang on, I'll C&P
("Project Delphi". What is going ON? Is that... that thing is some kind of project of Cyber Connect?)
"...disturbance earlier this evening."
A woman's voice jarred Hiroshi from his ponderings. He spent several seconds remembering that he'd left the TV on, and cast one more glance at the unchanged chat window before turning to face it. A petite, middle-aged woman greeted him from the glowing screen, neatly dressed in a blue blazer and standing before a well-lit building.
His memory kicked into high gear when he recognized the building. (The hospital?) he thought, raising an eyebrow. (That's where Yasuhiko is.)
Another glance at the chat window brought the rest of his body back around to face the new text that had appeared.
Deisart: "Summary: An amalgam of digital entities, an ICE (Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics) unit is an automatic response system which acts independent of the user to defend a file, drive or server from hostile intruders. ICE recognizes over 22,000,000 known virus types, and - using advanced pattern-matching algorithms - is fully capable of identifying hacker penetration, adjusting its response to uniquely combat the attack, and even preemptively strike known hostile entities."
(An ICE unit... so this thing is some kind of hacker protection?)
Deisart: "Date of Inception: 7/31/2008. Postmortem: Prototype units deemed unreliable following incident 24b-09. Funding withdrawn, project discontinued 9/16/2008."
Kite: Discontinued?
Deisart: Some sort of accident; apparently, a trial run caused Delphi to identify and aggressively attack the programmer who tested it, even outside of the experiment. Delphi managed to break into The World through the backdoor on Delta server, and the programmer, who also served as one of The World's Admins, was attacked in the game by Delphi. He fell into a coma and died six weeks later.
The boy's blood ran cold. (He DIED?? This thing actually killed somebody?!) His partner soon voiced a similar sentiment.
Deisart: Yes. It wasn't designed to function in a virtual environment such as The World, though; its means of defense was through the rewriting of data - usually crippling the targeted software, and occasionally to the point where Delphi could take control of viruses, or the software of invading hackers.
Kite: That sounds a lot like Data Drain...
It was out before he had a chance to think twice about it, and yet he couldn't deny the similarities. His heart sank, just a little, but enough to bring his head down with it. (It really is the same, isn't it... this isn't supposed to be mine. This can't be...)
Deisart: Indeed. One other thing I found was that the company has a record of this programmer being contacted by another company, one of their chief rivals at the time.
BlackRose: So this programmer talked to someone outside the company about this?
Kite: Then that means they sent it after him, too.
Again, the thought failed to register with Hiroshi until it appeared before his eyes. This one sent a chill down his spine, an icy touch of fear that cut through the swirling, humid air of his bedroom.
BlackRose: I don't know what to say... this is unreal.
Kite: Yeah...
BlackRose: Wait. What was the other news?
(Other news?) He looked up the message log. (Oh, right... the really bad news. I'd almost forgotten,) he thought with a trace of bitterness.
There was a thirty-second pause in the chat before Deisart spoke again, and in that instant a part of him would have been much more comfortable to never have known the really bad news.
Deisart: I think it wants to kill us all.
BlackRose: That I could've guessed.
Deisart: No, I mean, I looked in some of its command directives; they were altered tonight. Not only did CC send it, they knew who to send it after. They've been watching us.
Hiroshi felt the blood drain from his face. Images of men in suits, black cars and helicopters, strangers in trenchcoats and sunglasses paying a little too much attention to him, all playing tricks with his mind, amplifying the feeling of paranoia a hundred fold. It wasn't just some random piece of berserk software that he stumbled into this time; 'they' were after him.
He gulped, loudly. That same paranoia began wondering if the room had suddenly gotten smaller.
Kite: But... why send that after us? Why not just come get us or something?
Deisart: I don't know... maybe they thought it'd be easier to get us in The World. Maybe just to stall us, have Delphi keep us busy so those guys could find us.
BlackRose: So what do we do now?
Deisart: Dean's on the phone now. Think he knows someone who can help. We can't just hand this over to Asara; last thing we want is MORE of these damn things running around.
He felt a sliver of relief upon reading the hacker's reply. It changed not that he had still helped them steal, but the knowledge that they, too, had been duped, and that Cyber Connect was by no means an innocent party eased the burden on his mind.
Kite: What about Delphi?
BlackRose: Maybe it died with Tamon?
Kite: I'd like to hope so...
Seconds passed, then a minute, and then another.
Kite: Deisart?
BlackRose: Maybe it's lag?
Kite: Maybe.
The keys fell silent as Kite stopped typing, plunging both rooms into silence. For a second, at least.
"...shot and killed. Their names have not been released as of this time." The reporter's voice greeted his ears again, and he turned in his chair to glance at the TV.
To his surprise, the hospital was still on the screen. A young, slender woman in a nurse's outfit stood before a microphone.
"I heard the gunshots, and then he came through here," she said, shakily. "He asked me where reception was, and ran off."
Back to the reporter. "There was one eyewitness, who said he saw two detectives apprehending a third man, who escaped their custody. It is not yet known who this man was. The eyewitness claimed that one of the detectives was shot; however, the police have not reported any injuries or losses aside from the two officers."
He shook his head, sighing deeply. "Hope Yasuhiko is okay," he said beneath his breath. (Yasuhiko... it feels like so long ago. I'd just gotten to The World and I didn't have a clue. And now...)
(...I still don't,) he finished as he turned back to the monitor.
A private message box flashed on the screen, cold black text invisible to the other denzien of the room.
BlackRose: What do you think?
BlackRose: Kite?
BlackRose: You there?
BlackRose: Oh, man... not you, too! What's going on? Don't just leave me sitting here!
Half-smiling, he hurriedly typed out a response.
Kite: Sorry. Was AFK for a second.
BlackRose: So, what ARE we going to do?
Kite: I don't think there's anything we can do. They just needed us to get the data.
BlackRose: I guess you're right... all we can do now is wait and see.
Hiroshi nodded, forgetting that he couldn't be seen. He leaned forward, propping his chin up on his palm and resting his elbow on the desk. He closed his eyes, growing uncomfortably accustomed to the feeling of helplessness, of being unable to do anything but wait.
A strange thought entered his mind; a mental post-it note that he'd shelved, only now remembering that he made it in first place. A to-do list consisting of only two items, both of which were sitting right in front of him.
He opened his eyes, smiled fully, watched the unchanged message box as his fingers fell into a natural rhythm, banging out a message he'd been sitting on for a while now. Emboldened by their success in the game - or merely to break the silence, he wasn't sure which - his hands danced across the keyboard, keys drowning out the reporter's voice, at least in his ears.
Kite: Thanks for helping me.
Instantly, he feared he'd been too forward, not understanding how 'thank you' could be considered such but he feared it just the same. Unsure of how much of BlackRose's personality was drawn from her puppeteer, he fidgeted nervously, eyes never leaving the message box.
BlackRose: Yeah... you too.
Hiroshi blinked at the message; lacking enough context to decide whether she meant it or not, he continued to sit and wait.
He didn't have to wait very long. A smiling emote popped up in her next message, the messenger changing it to a picture of a yellow smiley face.
He smiled. He grinned. He chuckled, and let out a long, deep sigh of relief.
Kite: Anytime partner :-)
Another emote answered him, this one a winking smiley face. He chuckled again, his grin broadening. (What would I do without her?) he pondered, leaning back in his chair and propping his feet up on the desk.
His brief moment of relaxation ended when the screen suddenly went dark. Puzzled, he sat up and gave the monitor a once-over; still receiving power, the monitor simply stared back at him with its empty black screen, his face reflected in the darkness.
Without warning, a message appeared on screen in bright, bold crimson letters, burning a hole in the blackness. At that moment, Hiroshi wanted nothing more than to turn and run, as far and as fast as he could.
DELPHI HAS FOUND YOU.
- End of Chapter XXII
A .Hack fanfiction by Renfro Calhoun
Disclaimer: .Hack and attached characters and concepts are property of Bandai and CC. Original characters are mine; however, since even the characters I created aren't really that original - particularly the hard-boiled ex-cop - I suppose they exist in some weird limbo-like state of ownership. Or possibly on the moon. Ah, whatever.
Notes: Currently at some undisclosed amount of time (roughly a day) after the start of Mutation. Parentheses indicate thoughts. Oh, how I wish I'd thought up sword-chucks first...
Chapter XXII - Current Events
------------
*Kite has joined #Alias*
Topic is NOT set
Active users: BlackRose, Deisart
------------------
Welcome to #Alias!
------------------
Kite: Hello?
BlackRose: Hey, Kite!
Deisart: Good, everyone's here. All right, there's no real way to sugarcoat this; we've got bad news, and we've got really bad news.
Hiroshi cringed. Of all the things that could possibly have made this worse, just *seeing* that was near the top of the list.
Kite: What's the bad news?
Deisart: The bad news is, the files we got... weren't what they told us they were.
He blinked. "Huh?" (What does that mean?) he thought, translating his thoughts to the chatroom.
BlackRose: What were they?
Deisart: We were told this was accounting data. Long story short, the title of the first file was "Project Delphi."
Hiroshi froze, his eyes staring at the word 'Delphi'. He sucked in a sharp breath of air, his throat tightening.
Kite: Delphi??? That thing?
BlackRose: No way!
Kite: What did it say?
Deisart: Hang on, I'll C&P
("Project Delphi". What is going ON? Is that... that thing is some kind of project of Cyber Connect?)
"...disturbance earlier this evening."
A woman's voice jarred Hiroshi from his ponderings. He spent several seconds remembering that he'd left the TV on, and cast one more glance at the unchanged chat window before turning to face it. A petite, middle-aged woman greeted him from the glowing screen, neatly dressed in a blue blazer and standing before a well-lit building.
His memory kicked into high gear when he recognized the building. (The hospital?) he thought, raising an eyebrow. (That's where Yasuhiko is.)
Another glance at the chat window brought the rest of his body back around to face the new text that had appeared.
Deisart: "Summary: An amalgam of digital entities, an ICE (Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics) unit is an automatic response system which acts independent of the user to defend a file, drive or server from hostile intruders. ICE recognizes over 22,000,000 known virus types, and - using advanced pattern-matching algorithms - is fully capable of identifying hacker penetration, adjusting its response to uniquely combat the attack, and even preemptively strike known hostile entities."
(An ICE unit... so this thing is some kind of hacker protection?)
Deisart: "Date of Inception: 7/31/2008. Postmortem: Prototype units deemed unreliable following incident 24b-09. Funding withdrawn, project discontinued 9/16/2008."
Kite: Discontinued?
Deisart: Some sort of accident; apparently, a trial run caused Delphi to identify and aggressively attack the programmer who tested it, even outside of the experiment. Delphi managed to break into The World through the backdoor on Delta server, and the programmer, who also served as one of The World's Admins, was attacked in the game by Delphi. He fell into a coma and died six weeks later.
The boy's blood ran cold. (He DIED?? This thing actually killed somebody?!) His partner soon voiced a similar sentiment.
Deisart: Yes. It wasn't designed to function in a virtual environment such as The World, though; its means of defense was through the rewriting of data - usually crippling the targeted software, and occasionally to the point where Delphi could take control of viruses, or the software of invading hackers.
Kite: That sounds a lot like Data Drain...
It was out before he had a chance to think twice about it, and yet he couldn't deny the similarities. His heart sank, just a little, but enough to bring his head down with it. (It really is the same, isn't it... this isn't supposed to be mine. This can't be...)
Deisart: Indeed. One other thing I found was that the company has a record of this programmer being contacted by another company, one of their chief rivals at the time.
BlackRose: So this programmer talked to someone outside the company about this?
Kite: Then that means they sent it after him, too.
Again, the thought failed to register with Hiroshi until it appeared before his eyes. This one sent a chill down his spine, an icy touch of fear that cut through the swirling, humid air of his bedroom.
BlackRose: I don't know what to say... this is unreal.
Kite: Yeah...
BlackRose: Wait. What was the other news?
(Other news?) He looked up the message log. (Oh, right... the really bad news. I'd almost forgotten,) he thought with a trace of bitterness.
There was a thirty-second pause in the chat before Deisart spoke again, and in that instant a part of him would have been much more comfortable to never have known the really bad news.
Deisart: I think it wants to kill us all.
BlackRose: That I could've guessed.
Deisart: No, I mean, I looked in some of its command directives; they were altered tonight. Not only did CC send it, they knew who to send it after. They've been watching us.
Hiroshi felt the blood drain from his face. Images of men in suits, black cars and helicopters, strangers in trenchcoats and sunglasses paying a little too much attention to him, all playing tricks with his mind, amplifying the feeling of paranoia a hundred fold. It wasn't just some random piece of berserk software that he stumbled into this time; 'they' were after him.
He gulped, loudly. That same paranoia began wondering if the room had suddenly gotten smaller.
Kite: But... why send that after us? Why not just come get us or something?
Deisart: I don't know... maybe they thought it'd be easier to get us in The World. Maybe just to stall us, have Delphi keep us busy so those guys could find us.
BlackRose: So what do we do now?
Deisart: Dean's on the phone now. Think he knows someone who can help. We can't just hand this over to Asara; last thing we want is MORE of these damn things running around.
He felt a sliver of relief upon reading the hacker's reply. It changed not that he had still helped them steal, but the knowledge that they, too, had been duped, and that Cyber Connect was by no means an innocent party eased the burden on his mind.
Kite: What about Delphi?
BlackRose: Maybe it died with Tamon?
Kite: I'd like to hope so...
Seconds passed, then a minute, and then another.
Kite: Deisart?
BlackRose: Maybe it's lag?
Kite: Maybe.
The keys fell silent as Kite stopped typing, plunging both rooms into silence. For a second, at least.
"...shot and killed. Their names have not been released as of this time." The reporter's voice greeted his ears again, and he turned in his chair to glance at the TV.
To his surprise, the hospital was still on the screen. A young, slender woman in a nurse's outfit stood before a microphone.
"I heard the gunshots, and then he came through here," she said, shakily. "He asked me where reception was, and ran off."
Back to the reporter. "There was one eyewitness, who said he saw two detectives apprehending a third man, who escaped their custody. It is not yet known who this man was. The eyewitness claimed that one of the detectives was shot; however, the police have not reported any injuries or losses aside from the two officers."
He shook his head, sighing deeply. "Hope Yasuhiko is okay," he said beneath his breath. (Yasuhiko... it feels like so long ago. I'd just gotten to The World and I didn't have a clue. And now...)
(...I still don't,) he finished as he turned back to the monitor.
A private message box flashed on the screen, cold black text invisible to the other denzien of the room.
BlackRose: What do you think?
BlackRose: Kite?
BlackRose: You there?
BlackRose: Oh, man... not you, too! What's going on? Don't just leave me sitting here!
Half-smiling, he hurriedly typed out a response.
Kite: Sorry. Was AFK for a second.
BlackRose: So, what ARE we going to do?
Kite: I don't think there's anything we can do. They just needed us to get the data.
BlackRose: I guess you're right... all we can do now is wait and see.
Hiroshi nodded, forgetting that he couldn't be seen. He leaned forward, propping his chin up on his palm and resting his elbow on the desk. He closed his eyes, growing uncomfortably accustomed to the feeling of helplessness, of being unable to do anything but wait.
A strange thought entered his mind; a mental post-it note that he'd shelved, only now remembering that he made it in first place. A to-do list consisting of only two items, both of which were sitting right in front of him.
He opened his eyes, smiled fully, watched the unchanged message box as his fingers fell into a natural rhythm, banging out a message he'd been sitting on for a while now. Emboldened by their success in the game - or merely to break the silence, he wasn't sure which - his hands danced across the keyboard, keys drowning out the reporter's voice, at least in his ears.
Kite: Thanks for helping me.
Instantly, he feared he'd been too forward, not understanding how 'thank you' could be considered such but he feared it just the same. Unsure of how much of BlackRose's personality was drawn from her puppeteer, he fidgeted nervously, eyes never leaving the message box.
BlackRose: Yeah... you too.
Hiroshi blinked at the message; lacking enough context to decide whether she meant it or not, he continued to sit and wait.
He didn't have to wait very long. A smiling emote popped up in her next message, the messenger changing it to a picture of a yellow smiley face.
He smiled. He grinned. He chuckled, and let out a long, deep sigh of relief.
Kite: Anytime partner :-)
Another emote answered him, this one a winking smiley face. He chuckled again, his grin broadening. (What would I do without her?) he pondered, leaning back in his chair and propping his feet up on the desk.
His brief moment of relaxation ended when the screen suddenly went dark. Puzzled, he sat up and gave the monitor a once-over; still receiving power, the monitor simply stared back at him with its empty black screen, his face reflected in the darkness.
Without warning, a message appeared on screen in bright, bold crimson letters, burning a hole in the blackness. At that moment, Hiroshi wanted nothing more than to turn and run, as far and as fast as he could.
DELPHI HAS FOUND YOU.
- End of Chapter XXII