Aftermath Volume 7

Aftermath: Race To The Brink

The bright morning of central California was as usual: hot, dry, and dizzying. I continued on with their work plans for the day, after all, being attacked by 4 corporations in one day proved to be quite the heavy task on me. No one really notices my mood, Satoko usually snaps at them for asking me about it, I've told her several times that it's fine for people to ask how I'm feeling, and yet, she keeps stopping them right before they can ask. I went to Corey to ask on the hacking yesterday.

"So, they encrypted the files they stole, and corrupted our major ones? That's... an odd way of clearing the evidence." I sat down next to him. "You know, if they hacked our personal files, this would've been a lot worse."

Corey looked at me oddly, like I had gone mental or something."They did, and they were trying to dig up as much as they could on you AND Satoko. They seem to not be very friendly with us."

I chuckled."Let's be more honest here, corporations here don't really trust us for shit." I was seeming to be happier than I was yesterday, or, so it seemed, but I was STILL really stressed out about what had happened yesterday. You know, beating Neo-ARK to a pulp, returning only to find out we were being watched and we got hacked into by corporations working alongside the Costents, I still don't know how Joshua had an outreach that big.

I sat down at my workspace, tinkering away at my mech armor, trying to fix little scratches here and there, fixing a big dent on the back that was not supposed to happen(Maybe that Moonmetal and Tungsten alloy I made was a little too unbalanced.), replacing the G-Cores, polishing the armor before reusing it, and then it hit me, harder than any object has. "It's not a corruption, it's a deep encryption, I might be able to decrypt the one's that are shown to be encrypted, because, well, if they encrypted more than half of our files, they wanted almost any weapon and armor blueprint that looked like it had potential to be great." I got up and went back to Corey. "Hey, can you- move for a sec? I think I can fix this up, well, the encrypted ones at least." I started doing what I usually do with encrypted files, start looking at their encryption type then work from there, I managed to finally decrypt them all and realized that it was Arleth Heavy Armament's own encrypting. Strong and secure, but once broken, broken for good. I sat down and assessed the issue at hand. We have ThetaTek Cybernetics, who, obviously stole our blueprint designs for all of our cybernetic armor suits and PowerArm models, which, if the PowerArm is released worldwide, it's not gonna be a good thing. We have Arleth Heavy Armament, which, stole all weapon blueprints, even though most we just failed gun designs and scrapped PlasmaBlade Mark II designs, and a ton of swords, some of which were never made, and shields, because medieval weaponry is still dangerous in the hands of someone who has been trained quite extensively on it. So, our secrets were exposed of our power, we then had Tana-Kano Evolved Nanotech and PsiSys Corporation on our tails, sniffing out our every move, we felt trapped, for the most part. Satoko was obviously worried about the kids' futures. She is the worrier of the team, always conscious about every move she makes, no one really DID expect the Costents to be this powerful, but yet, it happened. PsiSys's next move was to try and send a "public records collection" representative to our base, yet, those don't even exist. 

We heard our main door buzzer, alerting us that someone was outside. Satoko noticed."Silvs, dear? Can you go get the entrance? I'm a bit preoccupied with the kids."

I got up."Sure, no problem." I opened the door. "Hello?"

"Hi, I'm Hareka from the PsiSys Corp. public records collection branch. I would like to notify you that your public records are to be collected by us henceforth."

"Hmm, let me go get them. Wait here. 'Ey, Richard! Go watch the entrance for right now!"

Richard looked up from his phone."Oh, alright. What do they need?"

"Public records. I'm getting those right now!"

Richard went to the entrance"We keep everything spread out here, odd system, but it works."

Hareka replied,"Presumably so, your workflow seems to be amazing. And your leader, I assume he is. Terribly large for such a scalie."

"Yeah, but he makes the most out of it. He's a sharp one. Also one of the most amazing people you'll meet, but, he tends to have his downsides. Not a big deal though."

I came back with folders of the "public records".

"Here. I hope you have a great day."

"Thank you, and remember to invest in PsiSys teleportation links and transportation links!"

"Hareka's not too horrible, I think they're just, forced to be that way, y'know? She doesn't have a threatening appearance, from my view. However, I cannot presume she is a threatening person, as I literally had just met her. Her name seems familiar, as in, I've heard it before, like, during high school, I think she was in my classes? Like, nearly all of them?"

"And you never took your shot? She's a fine one, man! You miss 100 % of the shots you don't take, du-"