comStar Firewall alert - PhaseThrough

. . . Matrix topoloGy . . .
Hex was flying some five hundred kilometers above the Earth. In the distance he could see
the space station Treffpunkt Raumhafen, floating above the atmosphere. He was not alone. Two
hundred kilometers away a dog was talking to a crystal robot. Hex zoomed in, and he could see
the reflections of the dog’s fur in the sparkling crystals of the machine. Hex was waiting.
Suddenly his left index finger was throbbing. He looked at one of the semi-opaque monitors
floating in front of him—the ones only he could see. The video feed showed a man in a black suit
with mirrored glasses walking out of a building. It was time to go.
The hacker, a bright blur of speed, approached North America, shifting to the regional
telecommunication grid of the UCAS without a nanosecond’s pause. Further on he sped until
he stood in the Seattle Matrix in front of a shining cab gleaming with emerald fire. This cab
would take him to his destination, a private network. He entered the taxi and darted through a
data highway until he reached a distant field with a setting sun. A farmer approached, asking
for goods to trade. Hex produced a hay cart from his pockets and offered it. The farmer nodded
and went to work on the crops in the field.
Hex strode on towards the farm. It consisted of a barn, a main building, and a small cottage.
He mentally ran through a short series of instructions, and small descriptions appeared
next to the buildings. A man in blue working clothes came out of the barn. Hex reached into his
pockets and drew out a small magnifying glass. He watched the worker through the glass and
read the long lines of data materializing in the air. The man in blue was just another persona.
With another mental command, the scenery instantly transformed. The buildings turned
into small gray blocks with fine black lines in between, pulsing with the light of data traffic.
The fields around him shrank to a large room with only one door where the road had been.
Hex’s reality filter had stripped away the useless and the nonsensical, translating the look of
the network to the bare information-content he preferred.
The hacker analyzed the room he was in, the node acting as network hub. Seconds later
he had cracked his way into the hub, reading the node descriptions reserved for security users
and adding further information to the labels of the network’s nodes. The former barn, now just
a gray block, turned red, showing it to be a security node. A small plate fingerprint scanner
marked the entrance.
Hex smiled. Sometimes it was just too easy. He pulled out a gun and fired at the scanner.
The block started to glow in red light. Active alert. With a grin that never reached his physical
body Hex logged off the node.
Unwired
Simon Wentworth (order #1132857) 9
47