Webcam up in here.

[seems_legit]

[Hardison is sitting in a nondescript warehouse somewhere, chillin' at a desk, with a bottle of orange soda in hand. Clearly someone else must have gotten it for him, because he's still on Hypatia's shit list. He leans back in his chair and folds his arms over his chest--wait, the camera...he's using his netbook's webcam to broadcast onto the

Comments

[Voice]

[knight4darkness]

...what is the 'Deathstar'?

Video.

[seems_legit]

[Hardison just blinks, buddy. Your voice sounds...oddly familiar, but he's not sure from where or when, exactly.]

Someone built something huge and dangerous. How's that?

[Permaaudio]

[knight4darkness]

[take the Peter Cullen Optimus voice, play with the distortion settings, adjust the register to be a bit lower and give it a bit of an accent...and there you have some fanon. wasn't that fun?]

Understandable.

[beat]

Is this not normal for this station?

[seems_legit]

Considerin' I got ousted and refused food for liftin' imaginary money, I'mma say: naw, s'probably not.

There's a lot of system overrides going on. Looks like whatever this business is, it's violating the credit system, the inherent safety protocols, the lights and weather grid, pretty much anything you can mess with.

Either it's somethin' awesome as hell, or somethin' dangerous as hell.

[video]

[notjelly]

[Tilting her head at the feed and blinking large green cat eyes. She's still wearing her corkscrew troll horns.]

Oooh? You can understand what all that is saying?

Video.

[seems_legit]

[What in the hell--? Hardison just stares for a moment.]

Uh, yeah. It's just remote management runtimes, nothin' particularly complex...are you using a video filter?

[video]

[notjelly]

[Props her head on chin on her hands, which are conspicuously clawed and covered in green-brown fur.] Hmmm, I've never really understood computers. Especially not the code part! But it's always impressive to see someone who does. That is code, right? It's pretty! [She might have to try wearing patterns like that sometime :|a]

Hu hu, sorry hon, I don't even know what a video filter is.

Video.

[seems_legit]

[There was a chick with horns and cat eyes....and green furry claws calling him 'hon' and praising his knowledge of code. As an avid Star Trek nerd, Hardison had always thought alien chicks were hot.

At the moment, though, he's having a hard time reconciling that belief with what's going down.]

Yeah, tch--s'nothin. Just keeping an eye on things, someone's gotta. Code can go crazy at any time.

So...you're an alien?

Video

[theniputitback]

[Parker doesn't really look at the power readings or the logs, or pay much attention to what Hardison's saying about Zone 7. Instead, she's studying Hardison himself, trying to see if...

Well.

She's just studying him, okay.

The video clicks on to reveal Parker's face, and not much else. She's leaned in fairly close to the camera, and it's too dark to make out much of anything about what her surroundings might be.

There's also a weird sort of echo when she speaks.]

Hardison?

Video

[seems_legit]

[This seems weird. Hardison just sort of leans in toward the camera and arches a brow.]

...Yeah?

Video

[theniputitback]

[She doesn't smile hello, just looks at the camera some more - and then looks away, peering up over her wearable, as if trying to make out something in front of her.

After a moment, she looks at the screen again.]

Uh.

Nothing.

[She shifts a little, and at the same time, there's a metallic thump. That sound isn't coming from over the wearable, though. In fact, it sounds as if it's coming from inside the wall just in front of Hardison's computer.]

Video/Action.

[seems_legit]

[Hardison leans back and looks at the wall. He looks back at the screen.]

Uh...Parker.

Why are you in the wall?

Are you stuck?

[ text > encrypted: 100% ]

[seems_legit]

[Well, Hardison recognizes that encryption method, even if all the network signature data is different.]

Dude, you really think she'll answer me when 214 individual safety alerts have gone unnoticed? Someone's beating down her front door, don't think she's likely to check her pager.

[ text > encrypted: 100% ]

[seems_legit]

Hell yeah I did. Had the subsystems feeding data to me since I got booted; there was a processing shift and new higher function program started up a while ago.

By the time I started investigating it, it was locked down and encrypted like they were protecting digital Fort Knox.

Didn't think much of it at the time, given how much the local sysadmin likes me, but seems suspicious as hell, now.

[A few keys and he sends you the logs for the last few days. The incident he's describing is very apparent at about the time Shodan took control.]

[video // encrypted from requests originating in Zone 07]

[electroniccrane]

Seven itself is a black hole. Total packet loss.

video

[seems_legit]

Any clue as to what's up?

I mean, if something's about to get jettison'd, I'd rather move as far away from it as possible, know what I'm sayin'?

video

[electroniccrane]

I think someone carved themselves out a chunk of the station information infrastructure and then closed all the ports. Probably one or more of the AIs.

I haven't tried to dive it yet. I'd have to be physically present and that calls for recon before anyone goes charging in.

video

[seems_legit]

[Well, you sound pretty sure of yourself, Asian lady. Hardison isn't quite sure what diving it refers to where you're from, but it sounds like his sort of gig. Recon...well that's definitely in his ballpark.]

Man, you can have my data, but it's all internal pings. I can dig deeper into the system for more specifics, maybe live request data, but that'll take time.

[With Hypatia's security...that would take a lot of time and blind luck.]