Reality in Motion

ECHOnet

There weren't a lot of things he was proud of in his life. His personality needed work. The cons he had pulled could always be improved. Projects weren't always successful (hello, Project Insight?). And his relationships? Get the fuck out of here.

But if there was one thing he would always be proud of and hold close to his heart, it would be the program he created that allowed him to access different databases without anyone noticing. Secretly, he called it ECHOnet - or the Entry to Computers without Help and by Oneself network. Openly, he just referred to his "program." Most people didn't question it, certainly not Q - she had a hard time with technology as it was.

Not only did ECHOnet have access to whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, it also held an impressive amount of data and was constantly running different searches throughout various open networks in an effort to find keywords that fit the plug-in. And thankfully, it was coded specifically so that if anyone somehow found their way into it or noticed what it was doing, the program would bounce the person across the world. No one would find the central base, which came in handy over the past year while they were on their little adventure.

Except for when there was a sudden ping that came from one of the several monitors that were set up in the living room area. Dawson turned out from where he was rifling through the fridge to look over his shoulder at the terminal. It wasn't a normal sounding ping. Not the one that usually came whenever the program picked up some news about dead ex-Hydra agents, or the other that sounded when it picked up a pattern between the journal and the Hydra black box. No this was completely different.

Meandering over to the terminal, he held his energy drink in one hand while his other quickly tapped against a few keys to try and find the source of the ping. He pulled up a side program to run to see if there had been any sort of outside access. A moment later, the screen flashed with a confirmation code and a series of numbers that screamed virus. Someone had managed to wriggle their way into ECHOnet and seemed to release some sort of bug.

"Oh fuck me." he muttered under his breath. Setting his energy drink down, he bent over the keyboard so his fingers could fly against it. He followed the path the intruder had taken, seeing where it exactly it had gotten in (and making a mental note to patch it up), then through the various file folders and backdoors it had gone through and whatever else it had accessed, praying it hadn't taken anything of importance.

When he reached the end, he worked his way backward to find that whatever bug or virus it was had a specific intent. It worked its way through all the information ECHOnet had on both von Strucker and his experiments, and on the Avengers. The first part made a little bit of sense; he had assumed it was someone who had been watching them or someone related to Hydra, but the second was a bit confusing to him. And it didn't seem to be an attack - whatever the virus was hadn't erased anything at all, just...absorbed it. Like it wanted information on those two specific things. Nothing else.

While most would take it as a win and simply go back to restructure the defenses around ECHOnet, Dawson decided to take it a step further. He wanted to find out what exactly this bug was and who had sent it. For all he knew, it could be some Hydra thug who was about to come busting through their doors in search of Q. He wasn't about to let that happen.

Choosing to sit down instead of staying hunched over his terminal, he set himself up and fell into something familiar: tracking down the source of the virus. It was one of the first things he had learned when getting into his field of technological terror. A very simple thing to learn, granted, but something that had sparked his interest and was a clear building block in the development of his career.

"Earlier today, disaster struck Johannesburg, South Africa as the Hulk barreled through the city and destroyed buildings and homes." a news anchor reported from one of the television screens, "Officers tried to sedate and calm the monster down, relying on Tony Stark's Hulkbuster to help but efforts were unsuccessful. As officers tried to evacuate as many people as possible, Tony Stark took on the Hulk in a terrifying and explosive fight." It cut away to B-roll of the Hulk and Iron Man in some sort of double sized suit going on it. Roars echoed and blasts exploded on the screen, pairing nicely with the sounds of people screaming and random gunshots of lame help.