July 25th

"Come on, come on, don't do this to me… fuck."

I was kneeling in front of my door, test running a program I had been developing for opening doors without the required access data. But for some reason using the program made my omni-tool more temperamental than usual. This was the fourth time it had shut down on me, I was seriously considering giving up. There was something about trying to hack a door that the damn thing just didn't agree with.

I stood up and was brushing bits of dirt off my pants when I heard a voice behind me. "What are you doing?"

I turned quickly to find my batarian landlord looking at me oddly. His top pair of eyes were narrowed. Oh hell. "Uhh. Hey… Taren. I'm, uhh..." I looked away, shoulders tensing. "I'm not doing anything."

He crossed his arms. "Are you having trouble opening your door?"

"No," I said plainly, still not quite looking at him.

"Then what were you doing?" Taren tilted his head slightly sideways, which I had begun to associate with suspicion in batarians.

"I-" I should probably come clean, he's not buying it. I turned to face him. "Okay, fine. I was testing a hacking program."

His bottom eyes twitched. "Are you going to use this program to steal from me?" His tone was somewhere between skeptical and mildly accusing.

"No!" I shook my head vigorously. I knew better than to start shit with my landlord.

That seemed to satisfy him. "Then it's none of my business." Taren shook his head and went back upstairs.

My shoulders slumped, and I opened my door with the legitimate data, locking it behind me.

Taren was an okay guy from what I'd seen over the past week. He greeted me when I passed by him in the lobby and had bothered to learn my name, but I still didn't feel very comfortable around him. It was ill-advisable to trust strangers, especially here.

Little had changed in my room since I moved in. The sheets were unmade and my coat was hung up in the closet. I had a small stash of non-perishable food under the bed, a nice benefit of having a place with a door that locked, and a fabricated ceramic comb in the sink. I sat down cross-legged on the cot and opened the door-hacking program again, looking through the code for whatever might have been triggering the malfunctions. It was nice to have a bed again, though I was capable of sleeping anywhere.

Over the last week I'd been looking into making different programs. I didn't know the language the Sirta sabotage program was written in so I'd started reverse-engineering my own, but it was slow-going. I also looked into making something similar to an Overload, but I had no frame of reference and nothing to practice with, so no headway was made there. I was able to make a functioning program that was similar to Dampening; it had actually been rather easy considering I'd already made a program to infiltrate signals sent from an omni-tool. I simply made an altered form that forced the 'tool to shut down. I even made a variant that could piggyback from one omni-tool to another and shut the second one down instead. It wasn't perfect, it was easily countered by antivirus software, but if caught unawares I could fry someone's 'tool for quite a while.

I was also trying to get in the habit of working out. I looked up a regiment on the extranet that fit my time and space constraints and put some effort into following it. It focused on improving flexibility and cardio; the first I was already good with and wanted to exploit, the second I was horrible with and needed to address. I had to force myself the first few days, but I'd begun getting in the habit.

Something else I was working on, now that I wasn't actively trying to survive, was thinking about the coming future. I began going through what I knew from the games and sorted them by importance and value. I knew some pretty important things, such as the current or soon-to-be location of the Illusive Man's base, the existence of a Prothean Beacon on Thessia, the resting place of a living Prothean, where to find a dead Reaper, the identity and location of the Shadow Broker, and the continued existence of the Leviathans, though unfortunately I didn't remember where. I knew a host of other, less important things like the fact that the current or soon-to-be greeter for the Consort and the present or future secretary for the Embassies on the Citadel were sisters whose mother had died on Rannoch. I knew better than to write any of it down, but I spent a few minutes every day running through the list of things I knew and tried to remember more. Three years was a long time and I was worried I might forget something.

I was forming a daily schedule: get up, workout for an hour, eat, wander the markets looking for easy marks, eat, work on programming and/or research, and sleep. It was nice to have some order again.

Though, I was becoming aware that I needed to start getting more credits. I was making enough to have food and save up for rent, but if I wanted to get my omni-tool repaired and buy a gun, armor or anything else I had to increase my revenue. I wanted to avoid attracting attention like I had the first time, because next time it might be a very large and angry krogan I pissed off, so I needed to target people who were moving large sums of money. Unfortunately, people who moved large amounts of money on Omega tended to be from the three big mercenary bands, and they would not be easy to swindle.

Maybe I could move from solely electronic theft and take a bit of their merchandise. I've seen the Blue Suns moving crates full of stuff, maybe- no, that's a stupid ass idea. I'd just get myself caught and killed.

The whole thought of stealing from the mercenaries was fucking dumb, but I wasn't sure what else to do.

I suppose I could start watching them closer, see what I can get to.

I decided that going after the Blue Suns was a very bad idea, not shitting where you eat and all that, so I'd look into the Eclipse. They had a presence in the Kima District, which bordered Gozu District.

I cricked my neck and refocused on working out the bugs of my door-hacking program. It was possible I'd need it soon.

July 31th

I watched the robot, an older style of Loki mech, walk along its patrol route across the street from the rooftop I was crouched on. As it came to the closest point in its route to me, I activated the queued program on my 'tool. It suddenly stopped and sputtered, before going back to patrolling like nothing had happened.

It was fairly easy to spy on the Eclipse, seeing as they didn't really hide what they were doing. They moved shipments of Element Zero out in the open, even examined the crates right out where everyone could see. I'd managed to locate two of their warehouses just by watching where they took the crates. They only seemed to worry about someone attacking the shipment head-on.

Well, no one but me would be dumb enough to steal from them alone.

The warehouses were well-guarded; there were always at least six people and eight mechs onsite at all times. This had me stumped at first. I saw no point at which I could slip in. But then I'd had an idea.

The mercs were pissed and confused as hell when some of their mechs started acting up two days ago. Some would stop right in their tracks and refuse to move, others started following new routes. They still weren't sure what the issue was, and they hadn't had an engineer come down to look at them yet. I had to act soon, because if they did the engineer would tell them that someone was hacking their mechs.

Once I realized that I could use the mechs as a distraction, I had forgone my usual schedule for a whole day to focus entirely on writing a program to give the mechs new commands. The particular models that the Eclipse were using were old, and the flaws in their programming were well documented on the extranet. The program I eventually made probably wouldn't work on any other type of mech, or newer models of Loki mech for that matter, but it was just what I needed to pull this off.

I had discreetly hacked two other mechs in the past five minutes, and now with three of them I felt reasonably confident enough to make a move. Opening up the control module for the program, I sent new orders to the mechs. The three mechs stopped, turned towards the building and started shooting. I waited a few moments for the guards to get distracted, and then quickly climbed down the ladder I'd used to get up there and ran up to the door. The door was locked, of course, but after several rewrites I had finally gotten my door-opening program to work and it was able to get me in after a few seconds. By the time I got inside nearly all the mercs and other mechs were outside trying to handle the rogue robots, and the ones still inside were watching that side of the building. I moved quietly to the crates and opened one. Inside were smaller plastic boxes eight inches wide and about two feet long, with the symbol for Eezo stamped on them.

The distraction must have not been enough, because suddenly I heard yelling from inside the warehouse.

"Guys, get back in here!"

"We've got a thief in here!"

Weren't they supposed to all be outside?! Fuck!

I ducked behind the crate just in time to escape a hail of bullets.

Shit shit shit. I need to get out of here! Now!

A guard suddenly came around the crate and leveled his rifle at me. I was just barely able to dodge in time to another crate, only to run into an unhacked mech with its pistol drawn.

Things seemed to slow. My mind, which had been hazy with fear, was suddenly calm. I pushed the pistol aside and fired the hacking program at the mech. I ducked down and went behind the robot, quickly giving it the same command as the other mechs. The Loki mech, now uninterested in me, aimed at the Eclipse merc that had just rounded the corner. I heard gunfire very close to me, but I ignored it and opened the nearest crate. Grabbing three of the plastic boxes, I closed the crate and ran as fast as I could.

I heard the gunfire stop somewhere behind me, but I was already a block away. I slowed my pace but kept moving back to the Gozu District, checking every minute for pursuers. At some point along the way the adrenaline faded, taking with it the cold clarity. Once I entered the district I collapsed against an alleyway wall, nearly hyperventilating from exertion and fear.

That was very stupid. So very, very stupid.

Eventually my breathing evened out, and I made my way back to the apartment complex.

As I walked in, Taren looked up from whatever he'd been doing. He started to speak, probably to say hello, but when he caught sight of what I was carrying he took a step back, eyes wide. "Is that… is that what I think it is?"

I didn't stop. "What do you think it is?" I asked rhetorically as I passed by.

"How did you...?" He sounded completely gobsmacked.

I called back to him from the stairs. "What did you think the hacking program was for?"

Getting into my room was a bit of a hassle, but eventually I was able to set the boxes down on my cot and lock the door. I leaned on the door and let myself slide down to the floor.

I stared at the boxes.

Now, what do I do with them?

[Edited 2/27/2017]