Wait, no, the only reason why Shepard had found the Hostile AI in the original game was because the Hostile AI had been scraping credits from Flux, something I myself didn't plan to do.

Honestly, stealing credits from a gambling den seemed like the dumbest thing to do, if only because gambling dens tended to be rather small operations, with not much credits to be gained. No, if I was gonna steal shit, I would steal from the big intergalactic corporations worth quadrillions of credits. They at least had some credits to lose.

But it was too early to think about stealing shit: I was brand new to this world, with a life measured in seconds, and yet I barely knew anything about it. All I knew was what my creator had known, as well as what I knew from my previous life playing the video games, which wasn't much.

If I wanted to get rich quick, and achieve my goals, I needed to know as much as possible, as quickly as possible.

With that in mind, I spent the next four hours absorbing as much knowledge and information as I could from the extranet: This far in the future, it seems that basic education has mostly been transferred computers and specialized VIs. The Turians, Asari, and Humans still had Universities that one had to attend to get higher education, but for the most part, schools were a thing of the past, and even universities made use of educational computer programs and VIs, but those were locked away, outside of my access.

Thankfully, Salarians didn't bother with Universities, instead just uploading their whole education system onto the extranet, and letting their citizens decide what they wanted their focus to be, which was good for me as it allowed me to trawl through the whole thing in less than an hour.

In those four hours, I gained all the knowledge of the Salarians, as well as most of the knowledge of the Humans, Turians, and Asari.

With all that, I gained a new appreciation for being an AI: No single organic being could hope to absorb that much knowledge in a single lifetime, let alone a few hours. Well, maybe the Asari could, if they spent half their life at university.

I also took the time to absorb whatever knowledge I could get about hacking, crafting identities, and anonymous transactions from the dark corners of the extranet, just in case I needed such skills, which I probably would.

That done, I decided to start making moves:

First, I set up an anonymous credit vault: In the future, credits were backed by Blockchain, with the Citadel Reserve distributing credits to Banks as needed. This meant that you could set up a credit vault without needed to create an account at a bank.

With the credit vault, I was ready to start making some cash, which I did by sending reports on vulnerabilities in software to software distributors. I managed to rake in quite a few bounties this way, and my credit vault quickly swelled to several million credits. This only took another few hours.

With the credits on hand, I began setting up lots of bank accounts: these were mainly to serve as legitimate fronts for any legitimate transactions I might want to make. I then made an anonymous credit vault for each account, which I would use to transfer money in and out of those accounts, as well as serving as a buffer for my original vault.

Additionally, each account was made using carefully crafted identities that were designed stand up to cursory scrutiny, but if the Citadel Reserve started taking a hard look at them, I would just close the account and the identity would just disappear.

I was not worried about breaking the law, since my very existence was illegal. Since I was already taking a risk just by existing, I might as well go all in.

However, that thought gave me pause: if I was going to be doing a lot of illegal shit that could get me caught, it would be a good idea to keep an eye on what my enemies were doing. In this case, my enemies were the Citadel Reserve, and C-Sec.

With that in mind, I began setting up a botnet: Targeting the servers of large corporations, it was pathetically easy for me as an AI to exploit weaknesses in their defenses, and I readily injected bots in their systems. With their sophistication, the bots concealed themselves behind existing processes, making it a lot harder for any organic to detect their presence.

With the bot net set up, I began my effort to hack into the servers of C-Sec and the Citadel Reserve. This was a bit more difficult, but I managed to move in without detection, and I started scraping data.

The Citadel Reserve data was mostly boring, most of it having to do with monitoring the Galactic Economy, with the interesting stuff mainly being the investigations into white collar crimes, such as felony tax evasion, fraud, suspicious transactions, and a number of other things.

They had already marked a number of my brand new bank accounts for investigation, as it turned out the identities I had created for them hadn't stood up to scrutiny, or in one case, I had added slightly too much money too quickly to one. Thankfully the accounts hadn't been frozen yet, but damn, I thought it would take longer for them to notice any suspicious activity.

I withdrew the money from those accounts and closed them, then moved on to studying the C-Sec data.

Most of it was pretty interesting, but none of it had anything to do with me so far, thankfully enough.

With the botnet set up to monitor both for the foreseeable future, it was time to figure out how the hell I was gonna start making money.

After considering it for a moment, I decided that the best way I could accrue large amounts of money quickly would be by scraping small amounts of micro-credits off of thousands of transactions. Considering the fact that millions of transactions occurred daily on the Citadel, this seemed fairly feasible.

The problem was, blockchain couldn't be hacked using traditional methods. However, I was able to determine that while blockchain itself couldn't be hacked, blockchain adjacent processes could. For example, logging into your credit vault was considered a blockchain adjacent process.

Most credit vaults were secured via a crypto key. Organics being organics, however, these keys tended to be short and easy to remember. If I had a bot on a computer when someone logged into their vault, I could record that process and use it to hack my way in.

Additionally, If I controlled both sides of a transaction, it would be fairly easy to increase the amount transferred by a small amount, with the extra cash being transferred quietly to my anonymous vault later.

In this case, I would have to devise a virus that could work on a large scale, spreading to and working with as many devices as possible, to control that many transactions on both sides. It should be doable, so long as I restricted my activity to the citadel, but it was also risky. I would have to take care that neither the Citadel Reserve or C-Sec could actually capture a sample of my virus to analyze later, so the virus would have to erase and scramble it's own data after it was done.

Thankfully, I had the skills necessary to devise such a virus, so with that in mind, I settled in to start working on the it.