Riley tapped out the last few lines of code, and all at once the dataframe of Sentinel Corp was wide open for him. "Hah! Gotcha!" He smiled and started to dig deeper into things, and immediately began attempting to pull data on the planet that Asher had been assigned to, when he suddenly found himself faced with yet another firewall. He could have taken that moment to try and push deeper, but having only just made his way into the dataframes he didn't feel like taking a chance with setting off alarm bells just yet.
So, he'd have to content himself with trying to figure out what could be done to help Asher. Supply drops were practically nonexistent, so he couldn't figure out how to authorize one of those for him. Messages were also closely monitored, and so that would have to be done extremely sparingly. Then again he didn't have a means of transmitting messages either, so that wasn't much use.
Come to think of it, did he even have a means of receiving messages? Planet Crafters were sent down with one message, and occasionally sent others, but most of the time it wasn't clear whether they were actually able to receive them.
Faced with the reality that he couldn't do anything else at that moment, Riley just got up from his desk and walked back out to his quarters. Laying back on the bed, he thought back to the last time that he'd met Asher face-to-face. He wasn't looking good.
"Dude, you look like you're about to drop dead here and now."
"I fucking wish. At least then I'd get to sleep in."
"I might be able to put in word for a transfer for you, if you were interested."
"Unless you can get it expedited I doubt that it'll be any good. Right now half the staff are out with septapox and I doubt they'll be happy for anyone else to leave the Winnarak Gate while that's true."
"You're right, you're right...well, just take care of yourself, okay?"
"Have fun watching people die."
That was what monitoring Planet Crafters was, wasn't it? Just sitting back and watching people die while numbers sometimes start going up. Of the eighteen Planet Crafters in the Izitial Prime sector, 7 were already dead and only 1 had managed to raise their planet's TerraIndex higher than 10,000 Ti. That, of course, was Asher. He smiled a bit at the thought, knowing that if Asher was being fucked over by Sentinel for something that really wasn't in his power to control, he was thumbing his nose back at them by succeeding at an impossible task.
That's Asher for you. He thought back to the psych profile that he'd managed to gain access to before he'd quit for the day. Every convict sentenced to Planet Crafting was subjected to one, and Asher was almost thoroughly average. He wasn't overly smart, he wasn't particularly athletic, he didn't even have particularly high marks in any subject other than his geoengineering exams. He was by all means average in most every respect. Barring one. He had ranked in the 99th percentile for tenacity. How they tested for that he wasn't sure, but it meant that there was practically no one else in the entire galaxy who was more stubborn and dedicated than he was.
There was an incident that he remembered, when they were taking the application for working at the warp gate. Asher had taken a long time with his test, so long that he could see him sitting in the room with five other people when the proctor said that the time was up. The other four got up and handed in their tests, incomplete. But Asher kept going. The proctor said again that he was out of time, that any answers given after then would be marked as invalid. And still, Asher kept going. He filled out the last answer on the last question, fully seven minutes after he had run out of time, and only then did he turn it in.
Him and Asher were the only two from the pool of forty applicants who'd been hired.
I suppose he'd have to be abnormally tenacious to have ended up here. Anyone else would have quit. Eighteen hour shifts on a shorthanded warp gate for days on end, and he just kept going. If only being tenacious kept you from making mistakes, too.
He put it out of his head, rolled over, and tried his best to sleep.
The next "morning" (not that morning or evening meant much on a spaceship) he made his way back to his desk, and was pleased to see that the hole he'd sliced open in the dataframe was still there. So, starting from where he'd left off, Riley went about trying to figure out how he could help his Planet Crafter with the information that he had access too.
Normally, messages to Planet Crafters were sent out on highly encrypted read-only channels, messages that they could receive but not respond to. These messages had to be manually approved by the overseeing officer tasked to a sector, and trying to get around that would be a task in and of itself. But there wasn't much else for it, so he simply started work and began trying to slice new holes into Sentinel's security frameworks.
He could go to jail for this. Possibly even commute his sentence to being a Planet Crafter, too. The irony would be thick enough to cut with a knife. Hell, maybe he could pull strings and get assigned to Asher's planet. Then he could do something resembling penance for the dumb guilt he knew he didn't need to feel but felt anyways. And Asher was more than likely going to succeed despite anything he did, but a little help never hurt anyone.
