winked at Cass. "Care to go for a ride? I'd love to do some more reconnaissance, but don't see any reason to advertise our work from here."
Five minutes later they were all piled into Marcus's Pinto, Fede tucked into the center of the back seat. The driver's seat was remounted almost into the trunk to fit Marcus.
"Where'd you find this car?" asked Fed. "You must have had to shop around."
"Cass made a few changes for me" said Marcus. "At my size it's hard to find a car that really fits."
"Do you mod everything?" Fede asked Cass.
"Everything I can get my hands on" said Cass. She gave him that same sweet dangerous smile, "But don't worry. I'm strictly into mechanics."
As they swung onto the road Cessus pulled an ancient grey laptop out of his briefcase and seated it on his lap.
"A laptop?" asked Fede in disbelief.
"Marcus said you might want to learn something. To that end I've brought this screen; as an illustrative aid. Why don't you watch and tell me what I'm doing?"
"Okay" said Fed, shuffling forward to peer over Cessus's shoulder as the system booted up. Cessus put a little grey plug into its USB port, thumbed a switch on it. A yellow LED on the plug began to glow. There was a transparent plastic shield fitted over the keys. He gently rubbed each of his fingernails. They were black, thick plastic press-ons glued in place.
"Those shells?" Fede asked, excited.
"Oh yeah" smiled Cessus. "They got them as implants now, you know that? This shit is the only way to work, and the implants are supposed to be way more sensitive. Got to get me some of that, we make any money off this run."
He ran a config program, quickly pressed each of his fingers forward, back, side to side, the shells calibrating against the movement of the blood under his fingernails as he pressed his fingers down. The LED on the plug flashed, his fingernails synching up. Then he started setting up daemons.
"Okay, you're splitting all our comm channels to reassign themselves through a proxy list. Am I right?"
Cessus smiled again. "Go on."
"That's… that's an encryption module? You're swapping channels for the remodulated packets. For the proxy list, yeah? You're making voice packets look like text packets, basic stenography… okay, what's that?"
The conversation continued while Marcus drove aimlessly around town. Cass was clearly bored out of her mind and tried to make some calls until Cessus told her she was violating the ether.
"You're making too much noise for us to monitor the cell traffic" Fede explained. He was impressed. The security protocols Cessus was using were extremely complex, but elegantly arranged. He wove their data streams according to some logic Fed couldn't understand until they were stacked next to each other. Once they sat together it made perfect sense. It was wonderful to watch, like beautiful code but real-time, reactive. Cessus was dancing with the data, arranging a set where they were invisible, the data turning inside itself.
Suddenly he was done, shuttled his work to a half-screen graph view, nine columns of traffic gently streaming up the screen, each representing a different data type or path. It didn't look like anything, anymore, or rather it looked just like the data streams had before he started. It would look like that whatever they did. They were hidden.
"Fuck" said Fed. He was grinning like an idiot.
"You got your gogs on?" asked Cessus.
"Yeah" said Fed.
"Okay, look for a music device in your PAN."
"PAN?" asked Cass.
"Personal Area Network. Old-school term for short-range devices; for a while they wanted to market everything by range. You know, WAN for stuff like cell networks, LAN for wired networks or WiFi networks in your house, PAN for your MP3 or OGG player and your watch and gogs and stuff. But once the wireless technologies started getting cross-compatible nobody thought of it like that anymore."
"Fucking marketese bullshit" said Cass. "Why can't they just let people call it what it
Five minutes later they were all piled into Marcus's Pinto, Fede tucked into the center of the back seat. The driver's seat was remounted almost into the trunk to fit Marcus.
"Where'd you find this car?" asked Fed. "You must have had to shop around."
"Cass made a few changes for me" said Marcus. "At my size it's hard to find a car that really fits."
"Do you mod everything?" Fede asked Cass.
"Everything I can get my hands on" said Cass. She gave him that same sweet dangerous smile, "But don't worry. I'm strictly into mechanics."
As they swung onto the road Cessus pulled an ancient grey laptop out of his briefcase and seated it on his lap.
"A laptop?" asked Fede in disbelief.
"Marcus said you might want to learn something. To that end I've brought this screen; as an illustrative aid. Why don't you watch and tell me what I'm doing?"
"Okay" said Fed, shuffling forward to peer over Cessus's shoulder as the system booted up. Cessus put a little grey plug into its USB port, thumbed a switch on it. A yellow LED on the plug began to glow. There was a transparent plastic shield fitted over the keys. He gently rubbed each of his fingernails. They were black, thick plastic press-ons glued in place.
"Those shells?" Fede asked, excited.
"Oh yeah" smiled Cessus. "They got them as implants now, you know that? This shit is the only way to work, and the implants are supposed to be way more sensitive. Got to get me some of that, we make any money off this run."
He ran a config program, quickly pressed each of his fingers forward, back, side to side, the shells calibrating against the movement of the blood under his fingernails as he pressed his fingers down. The LED on the plug flashed, his fingernails synching up. Then he started setting up daemons.
"Okay, you're splitting all our comm channels to reassign themselves through a proxy list. Am I right?"
Cessus smiled again. "Go on."
"That's… that's an encryption module? You're swapping channels for the remodulated packets. For the proxy list, yeah? You're making voice packets look like text packets, basic stenography… okay, what's that?"
The conversation continued while Marcus drove aimlessly around town. Cass was clearly bored out of her mind and tried to make some calls until Cessus told her she was violating the ether.
"You're making too much noise for us to monitor the cell traffic" Fede explained. He was impressed. The security protocols Cessus was using were extremely complex, but elegantly arranged. He wove their data streams according to some logic Fed couldn't understand until they were stacked next to each other. Once they sat together it made perfect sense. It was wonderful to watch, like beautiful code but real-time, reactive. Cessus was dancing with the data, arranging a set where they were invisible, the data turning inside itself.
Suddenly he was done, shuttled his work to a half-screen graph view, nine columns of traffic gently streaming up the screen, each representing a different data type or path. It didn't look like anything, anymore, or rather it looked just like the data streams had before he started. It would look like that whatever they did. They were hidden.
"Fuck" said Fed. He was grinning like an idiot.
"You got your gogs on?" asked Cessus.
"Yeah" said Fed.
"Okay, look for a music device in your PAN."
"PAN?" asked Cass.
"Personal Area Network. Old-school term for short-range devices; for a while they wanted to market everything by range. You know, WAN for stuff like cell networks, LAN for wired networks or WiFi networks in your house, PAN for your MP3 or OGG player and your watch and gogs and stuff. But once the wireless technologies started getting cross-compatible nobody thought of it like that anymore."
"Fucking marketese bullshit" said Cass. "Why can't they just let people call it what it
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