Chương 72: Upgrades, People, Upgrades III

AN: Here's the second Bonus Chapter, as promised for you lot reaching 700 stones. The next goal will be 800 stones, but since we're about to go on a hiatus for about a week or two, I'd say hold off on them. Though I think I'll upload a bonus chapter over the hiatus for every 400 stones. So, keep stoning away next week.

"The more you know, the more you realize you don't know." - Aristotle (attribution debated)

"Ghost," Dino said as he answered Santi's call.

"I've been waiting for you to hit my line."

"Mr. Dinovic," Santi said with an edge of respect.

"A growing fixer by the name of Regina Jones called me," Dino said.

"I don't really know her too well, but her rep as a fixer has been going off as of late, so I'm taking this call as a courtesy to her rather than an introduction to you. No offense."

"None taken," Santi answered.

"Good. Because here's how this works on my end," Dino said as the sound of a lighter clicking open was heard in the background, followed by an inhale.

"I don't take walk-ins, and I don't take recommendations at face value. I kind of like to look into people before I decide to have a sit-down with them. So, in this moment of bluntness, I'm letting you know that I'll be looking into your handle, board presence, and work history, including the jobs you've touched and the ones you've turned down. The shape of the trail matters more than the size of it. You follow?"

"I follow," Santi said.

"Good. Give me fourteen days, after that, if I like what I see, we'll sit down and I'll tell you what I need. If I don't, I buy you a drink, and we pretend this never happened," Dino said, coming to another pause as the lighter clicked again, and Santi heard the faint hiss of smoke being exhaled through teeth.

"And before you ask, yes, fourteen days is longer than most fixers would take. Most fixers are also dead or in prison, which I think validates my process."

"I wasn't going to ask," Santi said.

"Smart kid," Dino said with the faintest edge of amusement in his voice.

"If I like what I see, I'll hit your line to set up a sit-down. Show up on time and don't bring anyone or any iron unless you feel unsafe without it, in which case bring it but keep it where I can't see it, because I find visible weapons during a first meeting to be... Unimaginative."

"Understood," Santi said.

"Oh, and one more thing," Dino said.

"Regina says you're young. I don't really give much of a fuck about that as long as you're good since young and sloppy gets people killed, and I don't mean just you. I mean the people I send you to work with, and the people who are counting on what you bring back. So if there's any part of you that's unsure whether you can operate at the level I'm going to need, now's the time to say so and save us both the trouble."

"No need to worry," Santi said almost immediately.

"I'll be there."

"Alright," Dino said before abruptly ending the line. Santi sat in the dive chair for a moment, his hands resting on the armrests as the smell of recycled air and warm processor casings filled the space. Dino had given him a fourteen-day grace period to get his shit in order before possibly calling him in for a sit-down. He cracked his knuckles, pulled up Regina's contracts, and dove in to work.

The first gig from Regina's queue was a competitive intelligence pull targeting a mid-tier biotech firm headquartered in a leased office tower in City Center. The client wanted the R&D division's current project pipeline, including budget allocations, timeline projections, and the names of the lead researchers on their three most advanced programs.

The firm's subnet was running on a Kang Tao enterprise security platform, which was a step up from the Militech municipal hardware he had been used to cracking, though not all too different. It was honestly the same shit wrapped in different branding. The outer ICE was a layered authentication system with rotating biometric certificates, and the internal architecture was segmented into departmental partitions, each one walled behind its own encryption layer.

The R&D partition was buried deepest, sitting behind a dedicated firewall that cycled its challenge-response protocol every thirty-one minutes. Santi spoofed a maintenance access credential from an IT contractor who had performed a routine service call three weeks prior, sliding through the outer ICE on the dead technician's digital fingerprint.

He hit the departmental partitions one by one, bypassing each encryption layer with a modified brute-force daemon that his Paraline processed in parallel threads, burning through the challenge-response cycles faster than the system could regenerate them.

The R&D firewall put up a good fight, as it was genuinely a well-constructed piece of corporate security that required him to synchronize his decryption timing with the thirty-one-minute cycle and inject his extraction payload into the four-second window between key rotations. But at the end of the day, he was in and out with the copied data in less than twenty minutes, earning the first 8, 200 eddies of the day. This story originates from Royal Road.

Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. He swiftly moved on to the second contract, which was a data verification job for a legal firm in Charter Hill that needed confirmation of whether a specific set of financial records stored on a Biotechnica subsidiary's internal server had been altered within the past ninety days. The work required a comparative analysis of the live server data and a cached backup obtained by the client's own forensic team.

This one was more surgical than the previous pull, since the Biotechnica subsidiary's server infrastructure was hosted on an air-gapped internal network, which required Santi to route his access through a compromised IoT device in the building's climate control system.

In other words, he used a smart thermostat that had been installed during a renovation in 2067 and that nobody had bothered to update since, exploiting its known vulnerability in its wireless handshake protocol to bridge to the internal network, tunneling through the HVAC subnet and into the financial server's root directory through a lateral pathway that bypassed the primary ICE entirely.

The comparative analysis took longer than the breach itself, since he had to pull the live data, map it against the cached backup the client had provided, identify fourteen separate instances of record alteration, timestamp each one, attribute them to a specific user credential, and document them in deep detail. After about four hours, Santi had completed another contract and netted himself an additional 11, 500 eddies.

Santi was a man on a mission as he immediately went to do the third contract Regina had given him. This one was a pair of corporate subnet breaches that came as a package deal. There were two competing pharmaceutical companies, both operating out of leased facilities in Westbrook and wanting to know what the other was developing.

Santi ran them back to back, cracking the first subnet through a phishing vector that exploited a newly onboarded employee's unsecured personal device, and the second in the afternoon through a direct attack on their external-facing API gateway, which had been configured with default authentication credentials that nobody in the company's IT department had thought to change.

The irony of two competing pharmaceutical companies both hiring the same fixer and runner to steal each other's secrets was not lost on Santi, and he charged them both accordingly, netting a combined payout of 14, 800 eddies. The days blurred together after that. Santi ran two more independent contracts that came through the runner boards, both data extractions with pay in the seven- to nine-thousand range.

The first targeted a logistics company in Arroyo that was suspected of running unregistered weapons shipments through their commercial freight network, and the client, who Santi suspected was a competing logistics firm rather than any kind of law enforcement, wanted the shipping manifests and routing schedules for the past six months. The subnet was laughably undersecured, running a consumer-grade firewall that Santi treated like a suggestion, and the whole job took under twelve minutes.

The second was more interesting because it was a private investigator operating out of Japantown needed access to the internal communications archive of a family law firm in City Center, specifically the encrypted correspondence between one of the firm's senior partners and an undisclosed third party regarding a trust fund dispute that involved, based on the fragments Santi glimpsed during the extraction, enough eddies to buy a city block and enough family dysfunction to fill a braindance series.

The law firm's security was considerably better than the logistics outfit, running a dedicated Netwatch-certified ICE suite that required Santi to spoof a firmware update to the firm's internal messaging server, inject a passive monitoring daemon during the update cycle's authentication gap, and then extract the archived correspondence through a side-channel that piggybacked on the server's own automated backup routine. It was elegant work, and it left him with an additional 9, 200 eddies.

He also picked up a rush job from Wakako Okada, who reached out. A Tyger Claw-affiliated data broker in Kabuki had been skimming transaction records from Wakako's own network of fences, copying the buy-sell logs and reselling them to competing fixers in Westbrook.

Wakako wanted the data broker's complete client list, and a daemon planted in his personal terminal that would corrupt his local storage the next time he attempted to access it, erasing everything he had stolen without giving him the chance to notice the deletion until it was too late.

Though the breach itself was standard, the creative part was the corruption daemon, which Santi designed from scratch over the course of an afternoon, building a time-delayed worm that would sit dormant in the broker's terminal until his next login, at which point it would systematically overwrite every file in his local storage with garbage data while simultaneously spoofing the directory structure to make it appear, for approximately thirty-six hours, as though everything was still intact.

By the time the broker realized his files were gone, the corrupted data would have propagated through his backup system, destroying the redundant copies along with the originals. Wakako paid 12, 000 for the client list and an additional 5, 000 for the daemon, netting Santi an additional 17, 000 eddies. And between the contracts, the Aiden Protocol V2 maintained its steady trickle.

Santi rode the NCART twice during the ten-day stretch, tagging corporate expense accounts during the commute with the casual, practiced ease of a pickpocket who had refined his craft into an automated process. The delayed triggers activated across the following twenty-four hours, depositing three hundred eddies per skim into his distributed account network in fragments too small to flag and too dispersed to trace.

The SCSM skim also added its own quiet contribution, though the number of operational machines continued to decline as the city's vending infrastructure slowly deteriorated under neglect. By the end of the tenth day, the cumulative balance in Santi's accounts resolved across his Kiroshi overlay as 98, 789 eddies. He stared at the number for a moment while in thought. The materials needed eighty-two thousand, and he now had more than enough for that.

But with an additional twenty days of holding time according to Orsen, and it only being four or so days until he was given the go-ahead to meet up, Santi knew it was time to address the thing he'd been avoiding. Santi's current chrome was good. Good enough for baseline contracts and some of Padre's gigs. But unfortunately, "good enough" was not what Dino Dinovic dealt in, and Santi knew that. His hardware had a ceiling, and though he could overclock his Paraline Mk.

1, he could feel it was approaching the limits of what his custom firmware could squeeze out of it. The Ex-Disk's six terabytes were adequate for his current daemon library but would be catastrophically insufficient if he needed to carry the kind of expanded toolkit that high-profile corporate espionage demanded. And his implants, capable as they were individually, still communicated through sequential signal pathways that introduced latency he could definitely feel.

He needed to get sharper before he walked into that meeting, so he spent the next two days in the server room on research.