Ved:Hydroponics Lab:Office Complex

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Ved stormed out of The Hospital and right past the decorators, gah a wedding, lame. He didn't even like this Amber chick, she was ok and all, but she'd ruined his life when he was a Techno, when they'd taken her from the testing facility, he'd gotten in so much trouble, and now she thought she was the boss of him. He only put up with any of this

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The half eaten apple had long since been forgotten, laying on the desk and beginning to turn brown at the edges as Ved leaned in as close to the screen of his laptop as he could possibly get. The tracing program had tracked down a signal, it was weak, there was no way this could possibly be running the entire Paradise library, but it was something, and the more he continued, the closer he got, the stronger the signals became. What was this? The protocols weren't the same and he began keying in different combinations, "What was it Ram taught me," he muttered to himself, "this looks very familiar," he added slowly, his eyebrows coming together as he scowled at the program.

It couldn't be right, how could this be true, it traced to a Techno box, but not at the hotel, those computers, which he knew how to ping by memory, weren't still running. Where were these boxes being run from? And by who? Ved continued, maybe he could hack into the network and look through the files for indentifying information. Whoever was running this also seemed to be running a large network, though he couldn't seem to get inside, and there were only a few Techno's that Ved could think of off of the top of his head who could pull this off. Did that mean the Techno's were still going strong somewhere? Ram didn't know that if they were, and Java hadn't seemed to know either, and Jay obviously didn't know, so they had to be in hiding.

Ved sat back for a minute, stroking his chin in thought, would he leave the Mall Rats to be a Techno again? Would he leave Cloe? Would it be different under another leader, one who might let him be with Cloe and be a Techno? Ved loved computers, and the comraderie of like minded people in his Tribe, but he loved Cloe too. "I don't have time to think about that," he uttered to himself, leaning back in and getting back to work. He was going to find out who this was and where they were even if he had to stay holed up in this room for days.

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Typing furiously away, Ved found that every entry way he thought he'd found turned out to be heavily encrypted and he'd had to back out. If anyone had noticed him yet, they hadn't let on, the system seemed almost dormant, except where it wasn't, and they seemed to have no virus protection or hacker protection. "Ahh here we go," he muttered as he found a doorway, his fingers flying across the keyboard.

"Yes!" he cried, stopping long enough to pump his fist excitedly in the air before getting back into what he'd just found. A folder came up, but it was empty, and he moved up a folder, then up again, finding himself in a junk folder of uninteresting files. After closing the third file, all Techno written, Ved could tell, he foldered up and found himself in a main directory. "Whoa, better get outta there," he muttered quietly, double clicking into the first folder that caught his eye.

The folder was labelled "simulator" and what opened before him was not only familiar, he almost felt right at home amongst the body of files. Maybe he'd have a poke around and see what this was then.

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This program was familiar territory, Ved had seen Ram working on it, helping in small portions with it, and now here he was, moving around in the files. So if this was Ram's computer, that wasn't going to help Ved any, but he knew Ram wasn't running the Paradise software any longer, and the gateways hadn't been familiar at all. He'd looked around in the folder a bit longer, just to be sure, then foldered up. Where could he go from here? Double clicking on a folder, nothing happened, and the hard drive began to make noises as if it was trying to run too many programs, constantly working. Ved hit out of the trace route program, severing his connection before he got caught, and opened a script editor, running a script that would tell him all of the running processes.

"Whoa," he said incredulously, was that..why were there so many processes? He tried killing one that he didn't recognize and it instantly popped back up, repeating that a few times with the same results. Realizing that this was a worm, Ved began to feel panicked, his heart was racing, what worm was this? Beginning to run another script, Ved worked hard to stop the worm, eventually identifying it as the Infektor Worm. "Loser," that wasn't Ram, only a novice would use that worm, it was old and easy to stop, and after a few minutes of work he'd disassembled it.

Closing the screen on his laptop, Ved leaned back in the chair, running his hands through his hair, sighing. Well that had been trying, and his half eaten, brown apple was making his stomach rumble from the smell. His mind was whirling in a million directions, he didn't even know what to think about what he'd found, not to mention who it could be. Standing up and walking around the desk, Ved double checked all of his trays, every one, before heading out. He was hungry, there had to be something he could rustle up besides just that apple, and hopefully no one would stop him for conversation.