Chapter two: The digital shadow
Aiden Pearce looked down at the screen in his hand, gazing at the icon.
He didn't like change.
Change was the bane of his existence. When the light changed, shadows grew to hide his enemies or shrunk to reveal him. When the direction the target was facing changed, it ruined the plan he'd concocted, saving their hides for another brief second and putting Pearce in danger for another second longer. When his mood changed, it affected his performance. When his surroundings changed, his enemies felt comfortable in their home turf, while he was left guessing.
As he had been. For the last month.
Aiden didn't like being in the middle of change unless it was to his advantage, and unless he'd conducted the change himself, this wasn't likely to happen. He especially disliked it when there was more than one change, when too many things changed at once to keep track of. This newest change then, was a particular sore spot for him.
Let's start from the beginning.
Aiden Pearce considered himself to be a hard man to shock in anyway. His guard was only down when he slept, his gazed never failed to go over his shoulder every twenty seconds and he was a capable man anyway, his reactions somewhat of an urban legend where he came from. However, even the vigilante had to admit, this had thrown his game for a while.
Ponies.
Talking, ponies.
Pastel coloured, talking, ponies.
He hadn't been sure what to expect when he'd woken up after what seemed to have been a normal night. One convoy taken down, three muggings interrupted and a gang hideout taken down, all in around nine hours. Sleep at six in the morning and up at nine at night again the next evening. But the hideout he'd re-fashioned as his base of operations had been in an alleyway in the Loop, right under ctOS's nose. Not, in the forest he'd woken up in.
A change. A huge change, a catastrophic change. He was on the outskirts of a small forest, a village of sorts about half a mile away. A village of ponies. Ponies, of all things. Pastel coloured, talking ponies, some complete with wings, others with horns on their heads. All of them going about like nothing.
A quick retreat had been called for, back to his hideout. To think, to plan, to observe. He didn't know what had happened, nor why, nor how and he didn't much care. All's he cared about, was that is that it had happened. He'd set up traps, cameras, defences, everything to make sure his paranoia was not well-deserved. He didn't know this place, and he hadn't liked it.
Then, he'd come to his senses.
He'd calmed, stopped trying to think things through and just acted. Mental fortitude and discipline had kept him on the straight, narrow and sane for this long. They would not fail him now.
In under a day, he'd found himself in a new place, almost panicked, re-commanded his senses and then taken the necessary steps to survive here. He'd missed the computer course that explained to him how to survive in the wild, but he didn't need it. He kept enough military grade rations in these container to last him years. Weaponry was no problem; all of his accumulative arms were stored in the locker in here, alongside more than enough ammunition. Chemicals, electronic parts, pills and all other components to his ordinance and drugs were here in plentiful numbers too. All's he needed now were his hacks.
First had been the Profiler. Useless here, as it was; ctOS apparently didn't have a branch here, so he'd had to improvise. He broken into the public offices under cover of night, stolen his way into the records. He'd been surprised with the results.
Magic, was the only word for it. It was no science nor technology he knew of, and he wasn't going through a Digital Trip again, so that was all he could put it down to. Magic. Magic defences on the buildings, magically powered lighting, magic backups to the records on the local populace. And a whole lot of backdoors.
It had amazed him at first, when he'd instinctively tapped the lock/unlock icon on the phone, frowning to himself for his stupidity, only for the sound cue for 'invalid command, please try another' to sound. He'd looked down at the phone in confusion. It should have remained silent, there were no commands available to hack into so there were no invalid commands. That's what he'd thought. He'd pulled back again, the Profiler taking a backseat to figuring out this glitch in his software. It had taken him two days to figure out.
All the ponies here had magic, yes. He'd seen it, amazed and confused at first, worried and paranoid second, but he'd been able to deduce it as something like this; the ponies with horns, he'd called them Unicorns for simplicity's sake, were capable of actively using magic. Examples he'd seen so far were telekinetic powers and illumination for the most part, but he got the feeling there were others. The winged ponies, the Pegasus he'd heard one say, could fly, likely using magic to hold themselves up or, at least, for their ability to walk on clouds. The ponies with nothing, regulars he'd named them, were more basic, except for their slightly impossible strength. It had to be. Their muscles weren't big enough to do the things they did.
But there was something interesting about how they used their magic. The regular and Pegasus ponies seemed to have a natural affinity to use their powers, but the unicorns had to learn. He guessed they accessed it through their horns, as they seemed to glow when using spells, but he'd been able to deduce that to use specific spells, they aligned their own magical energy to the exact frequency of the desired spell.
How did he know this? Well, put simply, he'd been able to hack into it.
Such an amazing and fascinating ability, to use magic, but horrible and terrifying when out of your control. These had been Pearce's thoughts when he'd first discovered the use of magic. And it would be these ponies' thoughts when he used it against them.
It had been experimentation first, seeing what did what. He'd learned that lower frequencies tended to yield active spells, telekinesis and so forth, while high created passive magic, spells he could see in use but he could perceive in use, such as when the sun went up.
Yes, that had been something, to learn that the disturbances in his tests and dawn and dusk had been the sun and moon going up or down. That had done something to him nothing had done in a long time. It had made him smile. If he could figure out the correct frequency, he could, in theory, drop the sun out of the sky. He'd love to read the newspaper article on that.
He'd quickly moved on to other experiments, as to not get ahead of himself. Further field research had yielded more results, such as the existence of enchantments that had a variety of effects on the environment. He'd looked into the most common enchantments in the village, most of them taking the form of steam ventilation safety valves or power sources for what passed for technology here.
One of the later things he'd discovered was the existence of trains here. They used steam engines, but the brakes, lighting, the links between the trains and anything 'electronic' was all powered by magic. Yet another weakness. In fact, everything that he assosaited with technology was powered by magical energies, all using a simple 'on/off' frequency setting.
It had all been highly successful, only impossible to use in a chase or escape. Then he'd had the idea of using pre-programed apps for different frequencies, in essence, replacing his old ctOS hacks with the disrupter hacks. He'd made notes and kept records of everything he'd discovered in hopes of expending upon his already impressive arsenal. The only problem was that he had to limit his number of hacks in quick succession; blowing the steam valves was simple enough, but things like throwing the magical power for a whole block could get his personal frequency recognised and he'd be hunted down on the spot if he used another demanding hack like that right after. It all made it very tricky, but he'd managed to calculate what he could and couldn't hack and used the battery symbol he'd used before to tell him what he could hack back in Chicago safely before the ctOS firewall locked him out.
However, that all paled in comparison with the new optimised Profiler. After a second attempt at breaking into the record halls, he'd downloaded the magic backups. It made little sense to him at first, what a 'magical backup' might be, until he'd figured out that it was more or less the same as a USB, only in scroll form. Indestructible parchment and enchanted ink allowed for anyone to look up anyone's, or anyponies' as he'd later discovered, personal information from the one scroll in the form of magical frequencies.
Once he'd returned to the container and uploaded all the data from his phone, he'd been both impressed and concerned at the level of intelligence on the citizens of 'Ponyville.' Things like age, names, date of birth, something called a 'cutie mark', occupations, salary, criminal records and that sort of thing had been what Aiden had expected. But these went much further, further maybe than the ctOS network went. Daily habits, general weekly schedules, personal affiliations and so on had been included. All that, however, was nothing in comparison to the 'restricted documents.' This was apparently high level information that only the royal family was supposed to access, alongside a few of the higher ranking military officials. It gauged what they'd done with their lives and calculated what they were most likely to do.
It worked in the same way as the ctOS crime prediction system; look at their records for anything that may affect their outward behaviour or things they were likely to repeat for whatever reason or just ponies who were likely to act out and mark them down for surveillance.
It had given Aiden troubled thoughts: either the pers-pony in charge here was either very distrustful of his citizens, he was very thorough a his job or he was one paranoid S.O.B. Given the lack of technological convenience, Pearce could only guess that this place had a magical equivalent of the ctOS network, or some very strange public questioners. Either way, he was impressed with it, and determined to use it for as much good as he could. A somewhat complex facial pattern recognising software program in use alongside the information he'd stole, and Aiden Pearce, the vigilante, was back in action.
He went back out onto the streets, moving away from the village of Ponyville to places with more crime, given that after a week here he hadn't heard of so much as a dollar being picked up and not returned. That was another problem too, actually. He had no way of syphoning funds from these ponies. Of course, he doubted they would have any kind of digital banking anyway, not to mention they seemed to use metal coins called 'bits' as their standard currency here. It didn't bother him much. He doubted the banks here were that well protected.
That had all been about three weeks ago. Now, he was here, some kind of sprawling city-scape, as expansive as the Loop but as deep and with as many nooks and crannies as Chicago as a whole. He'd managed to find out the place was called 'Canterlot' once he'd raided the records of the place, and he'd found it to be about as bad for crime as Chicago had. He'd decided to set up here, wishing only that he could get the container he'd been living in over here somehow.
He was stood on a low rooftop, away from wandering eyes, his gaze down on the icon on the screen. He waited for a name, for a face, one of these 'cutie mark' things to throw up a red light. Then it did.
Name: Stone Trek
Recently injured back
Occupation: Professional rock-climber
Salary: 9, 897
Aiden hit the icon: crime prediction. It showed him as a 60% victim. It made sense; he walked, or trotted, with obvious pain and he earned enough to make him an easy target for a lowly thug to pick off for a quick buck. Or bit.
Aiden calmly strode to the side of the building, watching the laid-off climber trot down an alleyway. The Profiler showed he lived nearby, so he was likely taking a regular shortcut. Another advantage of the hacker's latest profiler was that he could access further information than what the original offered without risk of detection, since it was already uploaded on his computer. All's he had to do was get a match, and he was golden, not to mention safe from any security risks.
Looking back down at his marked victim, Aiden hopped down onto a lower portion of the roof before dropping to street-level. He dropped to a crouch, his right hand slipping into his coat to draw the 1911 he kept in there. He reached in again and pulled out the silencer from the small, tube-like holster he kept beneath it, twisting it onto the barrel as he followed Stone Trek. He dropped back when another pony leapt into view.
"Alright, you know what this is! Hoof it over" he yelled, a knife at Stone's neck. There was a stunned silence for two seconds, Stone likely attempting to comply but it was suddenly unnecessary.
The mugger's eyes latched to the tall, looming figure emerging from the shadows, his fore-legs raised and holding a strange piece of metal. Before he could do anything, the thing had spoken.
"You may want to reconsider that." The mugger quickly felt his nerve drain away as he turned away and bolted down the alleyway. The thing took after him, he could hear its heavy hoof-steps. It was gaining, he could tell; he looked back to find it closer than before, much closer than when he'd started galloping. Looking back down the alleyway, he saw a chain-link fence and jumped up it, his powerful earth-pony muscles propelling him up half its length before he hoisted himself over. He kept galloping. Looking back, he sae the thing hadn't faltered; he leapt at a trash can, planting on of his weird hind-hooves on it before he launched himself over, his fore-hooves holding himself up as he sailed over gracefully.
As he dropped down the other side, something in its fore-hoof glowed.
There was a bang, blinding smoke and scalding heat for a second, the mugger thrown off balance as he fell to his stomach, scrambling to his hooves again. He tried to get up only for the thing to pounce of him. He heard a strange 'clickclickclick' sound and then the world was replaced by pain, something beaten over his head a few times before he couldn't move thanks to the pain. The thing got off of him and he heard it trot away calmly.
Aiden didn't look back at the mugger. A simple chance and another cocky thug. He clambered up a fire-escape on the side of a building, disappearing from view as he left the limited light that found its way into the ally below, clambering back onto the roves again as he looked out over Canterlot.
"One down" he mumbled to himself. Aiden looked down at the Profiler in his hand, finding it picking up another hit. He grunted. "Too many more to go."