Rez: Eqstr[Tera]

by NiGHTcapD

WH3: NGM

Just because you spend all your time away from others doesn't mean you can't have friends. True, the relationship is a bit different, but for those who don't or can't have consistent friends in physical space, it's infinitely better than nothing. And while my hat goes off to the denizens of the other world for getting along so well in spite of having seemingly no common interests, my bet is that me and my "crew" work together way better than they do. No offense to them; in fact, given how well they do it, it makes my team that much more impressive. But I digress.

After I left EQSTR today, I received a delayed message telling me that there was a "crunch time" going on with the decryption, and my whole crew would be there. This was an opportunity I couldn't pass up, especially after the whole beanspilling I had just went through. It certainly wouldn't get my mind off it all, but it might allow me to make peace with some of the things that were troubling me.

As soon as I entered the shared textchat room, an audio client pulled itself up, followed immediately by an enthusiastic shout of "Hey, look who came back 'round when he came!" from the resident security specialist. "Jolu" makes them, fixes them, and can tell us how to break them, and looks through code in a way that nothing gets past him...if he can read it.

"Cut it out, Joe. He's been dealing with his own things, including but not exclusively that second reality." Vic, the translator, is sticking up for me right now. She speaks many languages, spoken and programming, and is fairly good at determining what translates from one to another. "But that doesn't mean you can blame him for being late to this, and using that old kid song to hold it over his head that he currently often interacts with-" She's not normally like this. My guess is that her annoyance with the impenetrable data is spilling over. Besides, she does have a point, it was somewhat out-of-line.

But only barely. "Vic, chill. It's no problem to me. Jolu, careful what you say-only a small portion of them are white, and even of those ones they're tinted." And now to get back on topic. "Is this thing really this hard to crack?"

"You've been here a few times, you tell me." Sig, our signal sensor and the one most like a "mission control", along with decryption expert for anything reasonable. (It should be obvious by this point that the data dump is not considered "reasonable".) "It honestly feels like a digital Bletchley Park in here, multiple teams working on the code but no one hacking even a piece of it to bits yet."

"Enigma? Really? Sounds like what you need is a machine."

"Yeah, sorry, but even you're no Turing."

"And it's not like we have a smuggled copy of the machine here, either."

"I thought someone cracked a part of it already? Come on, if we can learn Vesuvius then we can learn more."

"No dice. The dump was huge, and everything is encrypted differently. Just because one guy got lucky with one file doesn't mean shit against the rest of it all."

"Well, even if they encrypted it multiple times there has to be a limited amount of encryption types. Make a list of them and code a Bombe to put everything through, we can solve bits and pieces to begin with."

"It's not that simple! If that was a way to do it, we'd have-"

"Actually, that doesn't sound too far off. But it's not going to be just as simple as that, there's probably a new method somewhere in here we don't know about yet."

"Well, if it's worth a thought, then it's worth a shot. Let's get coding."

An hour or so later, we have a rudimentary (but workable) codebreaker program, specially designed for "the dump". None of us know who should try and run it, or if it's automated quite yet, or if we should open it up for public modification or keep it to ourselves. But we all know one thing.

"We need a break."

"What kind of break? Roleplaying again? I mean, it has been a while..."

"Hold the phone a moment. We got an anoma-what?"

"Oh great, not another one!"

"What's with the 'what'?"

"This one seems to...uh...have bad...connection? It's here, and then it's not." Not even ten seconds of silence pass before it pops up again. "And now it's in a completely different part of the net! What is up with this thing?"

"Dunno, but I'm gonna see if I can't figure it out."

I was out for another half-hour. I managed to track it down three separate times during that period; it looked like a teenage girl. But when I tried to scan it, it wouldn't lock, though on the third run-in I managed to score a not-exactly-solid hit by manually coding an anchor for locking onto, calculating the anomaly's position based off of visual data (the only way that my computer seemed to realize it even existed), placing the anchor there and firing.

I say not-so-solid because, barring the anchor, the laser practically struck open air. Sure, I got some data off of it, but aside from that it was like punching a ghost: you know it's there, you can feel its presence, but you don't really do anything to it all said and done. After the scan went though, it...she...disappeared, just there one moment and gone the next, though it kinda looked like she was glitching out for the tiniest portion of time (and my ears colluded it with a scratch of the world's tiniest record player).

It was at this point I gave up for the day, making a mental note to look through the (admittedly corrupted-looking, though I'd swear when I checked two days later that it somehow looked familiar) single scan of the anomaly when I got the chance.

Once I get back, I state my findings before effectively saying "screw it". "Unless it's being harmful at this very moment or gets that way in the future, my guess is that it's more trouble than it's worth. At least for right now."

"You sure about that Rez? This one kinda sounds like trouble."

"And given how our resources are divided right now, I think that we have better things to do with our time."

So back to work it was-the next day, that is. We spent the rest of our online time that session playing D&D and chatting about anything new, including but not nearly limited to what I'd been up to with the other world. It was freeing to get it off my chest, though I made them swear up and down not to tell anyone, and I left the breakdown out of it wholesale.

It turns out that they themselves also have had a chat or two with the opposition, under the guise of concerned citizens wondering why they would want him in any office. Apparently, he's just as solid a candidate as any other...but as always, there are certain turn-ons and turn-offs, and he failed to adequately justify how hacking is so much of a problem. When one of them tried to argue (separate calls, but I'm not telling who), he lashed out at them, and they hung up at that point.

The next three days are like this-play role, tell stories, get code-and it feels good the whole time. The fourth day, however, I wake up from an "epileptic's worst nightmare (which is just a slightly more surreal dream for me)" feeling somehow burned out, and somewhat bored with life. Until I remember something-then, I account it high time to get to EQSTR, layer level 07, as soon as I can.

Author's Note:

eNiGMa, a chapter dedicated to Alan Turing, of whom I saw a movie about him when I began to write this chapter: "The Imitation Game." Multiple enigmas throughout, including the code (pun? You decide).
Also, I'm expanding WH to also mean "World Hackers". Just because it takes place on this world and has its own plot doesn't mean I'm going to completely exclude all characters not from the other one(s).