Singularity Tokyo By Battlekrome Chapter 1 I suppose I should start from the beginning. Everything happened when I was in my early twenties, just after what became known as the Decade of the Knight Sabers. My name is Aika Nanako. I am a hacker of some reputation. Even been hired on occasion by some companies to redo their ice. My net handle of Daishi suits me. The number of viruses that I have spawned is impressive. Some of the buggers are so good that you really have to work at it to get infected files cleaned. My main play for viruses is those that will down a computer. If you remember a while back, there was a large shutdown of all computers in two sections of town. Seems that all of those people had gotten infected with my virus. Nothing lost really. My mean streak is not that wide if you know what I mean. Mischief is funnier and doesn't get all those nasty government people after ya. Most of my viruses are one shots or they only do little things. Mostly they are "ha ha, I got past your security". When the grapevine passed on an IP that was offering money and possible long-term employment to anyone who could crack the server. Couple of well-known hackers had tried already. No one had so far cracked it. Most of them had tried every cracker in their repertoire and still failed. Brute force didn't seem to work. Finesse on the other hand might work, and that's what I'm good at. Like all hacks, it helps to do your homework. Various books on most commonly used OS's helps as well. Checking out the base site with a trumped up web browser. Only if you cracked it, would you get an interview. It seemed like a custom job for the OS; otherwise, it was a cracked version that had been heavily altered for security and hardware restrictions. Usually sites like these have ftp access and such for file transfer and such. Checking the IP in my FTP client led to the usual errors. Surprisingly, the error wasn't no FTP site found but more along the lines of password not accepted. "Hrmm" I said. Usually a site's FTP access was slightly more secure. Checking some of the more common passwords, I was in. Looking around the site revealed the website itself, the pictures used on it, and another file folder called trace. To be on the safe side, I checked my ice. It looked like that I could do with a version upgrade or two. To do that would take at least two hours downtime. Oh well. Logging off the net both physically and electronically. I worked in a few trace busters and a new section of code I had found while trying to hack a friend's computer. Mostly my ice upgrades were implemented into my spoofing and such routine codes that would make me stealthier. Spike programs and such to nail trace programs and a couple other nasty programs. Logging back on to the net, I went and checked the BBS and some of the IRC hacker channels. No one else had found anything with the FTP way. No one had cracked the password, that intrigued me. Checking out the other's progress enticed me to try again at the FTP. Deciding to go for maximum stealth before trying the FTP route again, I logged off and switched the phone line to the secondary one I had then began the log on procedure. This took awhile due to the sheer number of routes, callbacks and bounces. Finally I was logged on and running in high stealth mode. This basically made me untraceable to anyone without a dedicated Cray 4 to number crunch back to my location. Loading up my FTP client I logged back onto the FTP site. Checking around with a searcher in the client. I found something I had missed before a concealed directory tree. Now I had access to the entire server hard drive. Checking my computers extra hard drive for space, I found I had enough to fit the entire server hard drive onto one of them. With a quick command, I began downloading the entire server's contents to the spare hard drive. With 20 minutes left of download, I loaded out a tracking program to check for incoming traces. Checking I found a trace working it's way down the list of bounces and such. The time read 15 min to completion of trace. Checking the trace location I found that it itself was spoofed. Setting Ice-Spectre anti- trace program on it. Ice-Spectre was a program I had coded early in my career as a hacker. I had found my hacker buddies could trace me way to easily. So to live up to my handle I made a program to trace back the trace then set the computer to blue screen and make it impossible to reset or turn off with out actually yanking out the power plug or net access line. The nasty part of the program was the person still thought they were tracing but the time to trace would slow and then stop five minutes after it hit. Five minutes later, bang target hit, time to reactivation ten minutes. That meant they had a half decent trace program active. Most trace programs stop dead and aren't noticed for a couple minutes. There the download was complete. Firing a Nuke along the line to knock out the computer gave me the precious seconds of disconnect time I needed. I always disconnect physically from the net when I log of due to all sorts of nasty remote activation programs that are out there. My virus programs usually are the type that requires large destruction of hard drive space to clean them out. My anti-viral programs are much more efficient. Modeled after viruses themselves they mimic all the known viruses and disinfect from there. More or less it has infected my entire hard drive and won't let any other virus take any of its territory. The upside is I can remote access my computer from nearly any location. The problem is so can anyone else who know the access codes. Being paranoid as most hackers are I encode and physically disconnect when I feel I need to. Which is usually most of the times when I'm not actively on-line. After I got fully off and disconnected. I decided to see what was on this mysterious server. Using one of my spare hard drives I copied all the data that was on to the server to a separate hard drive. Then disconnected my old hard drive and booted up the new one. As it loaded up I gasped as I recognized the logo on the load up splash, the Knight Sabers! I didn't prompt for a password at the end of the load so I assumed it was unprotected from their end when they booted up. They might have a bios password but that didn't enable it on my machine. Giving the OS a once over I realized not only this was a custom job but a good one. Then a media player popped and started playing. "If you are listening to this, then you have cracked our server. Congratulations. As you probably have guessed by now our organization is none other than the Knight Sabers." I whistled as I realized that they might be recruiting new Knight Sabers "To contact us just follow the instructions in the 'Read this' folder. Be sure to follow them exactly." Wait, a sec. I recognized that voice. That's it, RHC's voice. Now it clicked into place all those times on IRC and such. No wonder RHC hated Genom. I wonder which Saber they were. Now lets check these directions. Just directions to a pay phone and a number to call at the pay phone. Author Notes: Well another fanfic started when will this end when will I write more of what I should?? Also a different style and POV. Go figure. For those who don't know most of the net terms don't worry they were only used in this chapter. I hope. Translations for those who need them Daishi - Great Death IRC - Internet relay chat OS - operating system, Like Windows (yech) BBS - billboard system FTP - file transfer protocol Anything email for answers and RHC is a acronym.