Hacknet: Termination

Chapter Six.

After taking a well deserved night off you boot up HacknetOS and go through the previous email you were sent before you signed off. Someone had corrupted Jmail just to tell you that the path you're going down will not end well for you. That doesn't bother you as you've done far worse in the  past. Speeding up someone's Pacemaker to end their life, Crashing two planes to protect everyone from a biohazard weapon, as well as simply fighting off rouge AI's and for a brief moment cutting off the internet for everyone for a few months. 

You connect to the Rowling Node and see that it only requires you to break into the firewall. Seems simple until you get hit with a timer. You only have about 30 seconds to solve this firewall and goddamn it the character length was 18 characters. It shows up on screen fairly quickly as well however with the timer going down you only have time to guess by taking one look at it. You analyze the firewall and watch as it fills up on the side of the screen and through the mess you can see two words UNFORGIVABLE CURSES. You give it a quick shot and sure enough it works, You porthack the rest of it and do the casual scanning. No EOS in sight and not even a MemoryDump. Why is there also no other nodes? You look through the files on this node and find a single note attached.

"You've found a node, but the rest are hidden, to find them you must disappear and reappear whole and new once again. Become new and the path will be shown to you." -Rowling

You look over the note a few times until it finally clicks, You remove the shells in your Ram and you begin to probe this node again and watch the timer tick down until it hits zero. 

Unsyndicated foreign connection detected during active trace: Emergency recovery mode activated
-------------------------------------------------------------
Automated screening procedures will divert incoming connections temporarily.
This window is a final opportunity to regain anonymity.
As your current IP is known , it must be changed.
This can only be done on your currently active ISP's routing server.
Reverse tracerouting has located this ISP server's IP address as 79.255.104.29 
Your local IP: 81.817.642.018 must be tracked here and changed. 

Failure to complete this while active diversion holds will result in completeand permenant loss of all account data - THIS IS NOT REPEATABLE AND CANNOT BE DELAYED.  

You know how to do this, after all you did get a crapshoot of a trace from that hacksquad filedump a while ago. You still think it's garbage that they did that, but besides that you need to change your IP and it's a breeze to do. Break the ports, porthack, and Trace has been Averted. You return to the Node, solve the firewall, porthack and once you re-enter you scan the node you find that more nodes show up all of them inviolable as well. Why are they Invioable? You don't have notes on how to get past them so you just keep looking around, until you remember the X-Servers you got in the last test. 

You bring up Themechanger and sure enough the X-Servers you got from Grimm's Nodes show a single hidden IP 8.899.64.2004 and once connecting to it you find that it's a new IRC node and you see several people there, including names you don't recognize, but one group you do see that you can recognize with ease.

Carroll: "They're here folks."
Rowling: "So i guess that X-Server thing worked? Nice job Grimm.
Grimm: "I do my best, as always."
Dahl: "Welcome to the group...right?"
Rowling: "Yes Dahl, This is our newest member. I should explain shouldn't i?"
Grimm: "I'll make sure the whitelists are still working, Carroll can you message me the next job?"
Carroll: "Sent. I'll make sure the EOS is on point, Dahl do you have those pics you took earlier?"
Dalh: "Yeah, You and the others should check the Message Board."
Rowling: "Alright, So...I'll make it clear, We had MANY other users on our whitelist servers that were perfect for our last job position, You made it the furthest...so now you're here."
Grimm: "That could not be anymore confusing...I'll just email them with all the info they need."
Rowling: "Alright...Everyone get back to work. Welcome to The Termination Crew."

And sure enough Grimm sends you that email...on your personal email this time.

GrimmIsHere.Jmail
Subject-Termination Crew.

So I'll make it easier than how Rowling put it. We're a crew of MANY other folks, Our little group...We're The Literary Agents. We created that Node expansion to see if we could find any worthy agents to join us, and to be fair, you made it. There are other Groups in the Termination Crew, But we do most of the heavy lifting. You've heard of Entech right? 

...

Stupid question, Sorry about that. Everyones heard of Entech. Well those tech giants are back...sort of. They had a bit of a break in a while ago. A whole offline server got hit with a Sequencer attack and deleted a new program called Hacknet. Hacknet as you no doubt know about (Since you're using a copy of one) is very impressive and has all sorts of power that even the folks over here don't have. We're kinda stuck using Dark_HorseOS, While it's great, it's not powerful like HacknetOS. But listen, They're back with some new PortCrushers. Version Control, Eos Manager, Transfer, and Blizzard Updater. Now...Nobody has these and Entech has made sure that NOBODY can take them. They work on them on very private servers protected by at least a dozen whitelists and crazy traces. A sequencer isn't getting through all of that. Now what we do know is that Entech stores these new Port Crackers in FlashDrives in a safe at their headquarters. 

So what does this have to do with you?

Well to put simply, You're the newest member of The Literary Agents. (If you move up in the world you might meet the leaders of The Termination Crew) And we finally have enough Agents to pull off a heist. Yes one where you put on a mask and actually leave the confines of your personal space to break into a high secure building to steal Portcrackers on FlashDrives. You just have to do a few things first of course. But I'll leave that up to you if you want in or not. We're trusting you and honestly...We're in need of those Portcrackers. I'm sure you'll find some use out of them too right? I'll send an email tomorrow along with a PaidFriend Transaction, You need to get yourself a mask...if you Join us.

Talk to you tomorrow,
Grimm

Well...That was certainly something, But Grimm has given you a choice here. A simple Yes or No will determine how this will all play out. But first...Some rest.