strayphras.es

Space Hacker (Introduction Attempt #1)

Note from the editor (that's me): This part of the text was written a long while ago, but I lost access to the original files and don't know exactly when I wrote it. Still, I like how this story started and how it gives the proper background information to the world. It's not in any way perfect, but this seemed like a perfect way to preserve it.

A shrill resonating cht-iiing, announced the end of ship night. Gregory stumbled out of bed, and put on his uniform. He quickly glanced at the display at his night stand and saw that he had not received any messages since last night. He was waiting for a message from his family. A message from far away. He thought that no news was good news, at least and his mind quickly shifted to something else. His stomach made an uneasy noise. "Time to get some breakfast", he thought to himself. He quickly made up his bed (at least, as best as he could do in freefall) and then quickly crawled out of his cabinet. His private quarters on board the Bet, the 2nd-largest ship of the McEsee ("M. Cosa Shipping Corporation"). Gregory was a seaman — or what he had titled his job description a space janitor. There was no sea in space, but it was an old naval term that had survived from before the space age. He didn't mind. The job was all right and it was the easiest way to travel around space, while not having to pay a dime. Sure, the sights weren't as nice as those that could be seen on cruise ships — even the bad ones — but Gregory did not really mind.

Gregory floated in front of his cabinet door, and waved his left hand at a rectangular shape next to the door. With an audible kling the door locked and his belongings were safe. Theft on board of a Company ship was not something that happened, but he didn't want anyone else to nosy around in his few cubic feet of personal space. Gregory rotated himself (such that his cabinet door was now above him) and pushed himself towards the "L2 - Break Room". He only had to follow the arrows that were drawn on the floor. There were multiple break rooms on the Bet, but the one on level 2 was destined for low-ranking crew like him. He passed some fellow of the ship mates in the narrow corridors, but he didn't really notice them. He needed his morning coffee Gregory was, as he would often share in a loud manner during drink nights, not a morning person, so he desperately needed that morning shot of caffeine.

A few moments later, he arrived in the break room. He carefully pulled on a bar near the top side of the room's entrance to halt his momentum, angled his body towards the break room and pushed himself inwards. "Morning C", a smooth voice shouted across the break room towards him. Khervan was waiting for him, as he usually did every morning. Gregory responded by subtlety nodding towards him. He was a man of a few words. He wasn't a talkative person, especially not without any alcohol nor caffeine in his body. He drifted towards the drinks dispenser, attached an empty drinks pouch on one of the many nozzles, and waved his hand in front of the button labelled "Coffee - Strong". A brown oozy liquid filled the pouch, slowly. Khervan was looking at his e-tablet, probably checking today's duties. If the ship was still cruising according to plan, they would be entering FTL today (hopefully, if the Symble Entity was well-aligned) and that meant that there were a lot of of ship systems that had to be checked, double checked and triple checked, and a lot of loose materials to be put into their proper containers. Most of these tasks, at least the non-critical ones, were assigned to the seamen, like Gregory and Khervan.

Around thirty seconds later, the pouch had been completely filled, and Gregory unhooked it from the dispenser. He took a sip. His mind calmed as the dopamine rewarded him for doing a happy thing. He didn't like the taste of the coffee, but he had grown dependent on it. "And, what's on your task list for today?", Khervan looked towards Gregory as he took as he took place next to him. "Haven't checked yet, but I assume it is a lot?". "Sure is, I have to clean the galley and the corridors on levels 2 and 3, and I have to sanitize the water recollection system at level 0. It's as if I have angered the ship himself". Tasks were assigned automatically by the ship's main control system, overseen by one of officers. Anxiously, Gregory looked at his assignments on his e-tablet. He saw a few, but none were as lengthy as those that had been assigned to Khervan. "Mostly cleaning the sanitation centres on level 6 and 7, and taking inventory of the cargo hold." "Man! Lucky you, care to take over some of mine?". "Not at the moment, maybe when I'm finished with mine I can check on yours? I'm not sure how many loose items there are in the cargo hold, so that might take some time". Gregory took another sip of his coffee, and Khervan joined him. Both remained silent until they had both finished their drinks. "Well, time to get started then, I think... see you at lunch?". "See ya.".

Gregory disposed of his drinks pouch, and took an empty plate. He still had to finish his breakfast proper. Gregory checked his e-tablet while eating "ship porridge". They were around 10 hours away from getting near the Symble Entity close to Enceladus, one of Saturn's many moons. Conventional ship propulsion was slow. They had only left Grey Station — one of the few permanent mega-sized space stations around Saturn — two days ago but within 12 hours, they could already be halfway through Alpha Centauri. He checked if any of the ship's communication system had picked up any local signals around the area, but he could not yet see any. The ship had detected many ships waiting near the Symble Entity, but it had not yet determined which ships. Long distance data communication was usually limited to satellites and other relay locations, and as the Bet was not yet close enough to the Symble Entity, it had not yet checked into its arrival systems, yet. Maybe in 8 hours or so, it would do so.

Gregory quickly checked the ship's canteen portal, as he was interested what they would be getting for lunch. "Blister Beans with Kafk-Mpossiblityeat" it said. It sounded disgusting, but those were the things one had to expect to eat as a low-ranking crew mate. There was not a lot of space for luxury and both "Blister Beans" and "Kafk-Meat" was cheap to acquire and had the (minimum) essential nutritional characteristics. At least it wasn't "Purple Goop" that space sailors often had to endure in the past. An interstellar treaty had ruled just a few years earlier that standard food served to space-faring crew mates had to taste of something. Gregory's stomach still turned to this day when he got reminded of "Purple Goop's" wonderful consistency. He was thankful of the United Space Regulations Authority that they had enacted said policy. Since then, Purple Goop had only be used in emergency situations were the regular rations had ran out. Purple Goop was cheap to produce and more importantly, didn't weigh a lot (before heating it) but that was its only redeemable quality.

Satisfied with knowing what lunch would bring, Gregory detached from his spot in the break room, and angled himself towards the portal. "No time to waste", he said to himself. While floating perpendicular to the drinks dispenser, he passed by a few guys in blue shirts that were talking to each other. "Yes, the satellite dish will be repaired early morning. Some debris from Grey Station got loose last night and had hit the dish. Should be an easy repair though". The guys in the blue shirts were the ship engineers. Just as the seaman, they were low-ranking staff, but they got the cooler jobs of actually maintaining the ship's systems. Gregory was slightly jealous of them, but it didn't really get to him. After all, he had access to almost the entire ship (including most of the ship systems) and he knew some good spots to observe space (it mostly was a black abyss, but he preferred that to some of the social interactions of some of his fellow seamen, except Khervan and a few others). Gregory thought the interaction between the blue shirts interesting, and took a mental note of it.

After exiting the break room, he went immediately to one of the main elevator shafts. Since they were floating in zero g, the elevators were disabled and people could freely float from one level of Bet to the next, without needing to wait. Soon, the ship would need to decelerate though so the shafts would serve their actual purpose. The numbers, on every exit passed by until he got out of the shaft at the seventh floor. He was going to tackle his tasks from top-to-bottom so seventh floor lavatories it was. On the Bet, the lavatories on each floor were always near the central elevator shaft, and floor seven was no exception. From a panel in the floor, he took a grey-translucent tube to suck up dust (each room was equipped with a suction system that would attach to these tubes) and from his trousers he got a pair of gloves. Time to get cleaning...

The lavatories on the seventh floor were not as dirty as he had expected. Usually, the higher the level, the worse it would get (higher-ranking ship personnel were usually assigned quarters in the upper levels of the ship). They weren't that dirty, but still there were a lot of loose items floating around. Nothing dangerous, but ship procedures required all loose items to be properly secured and be accounted for. Going into FTL was quite safe, but procedures were procedures. Gregory had to check every locker with personal items and make sure that nothing was floating around. Luckily, there weren't that many people that called the seventh floor their home so there were not a lot of shelves to check. He wondered why stuff, even in these shelves, had to be secure (they would not be able to damage a lot of other things), but procedures were procedures. That could have been the motto of the EmCeeEsCee he thought to himself, each time he wondered why something happened the way it did. The lavatories on the sixth floor were similar. But there was a smell there that reminded him from a party he was at, a long time ago. He checked the recollection system and found that that some green-coloured blob — it looked like puke but he wasn't sure — was blocking one of the internal systems. From his belt, he got some tweezers and quickly plucked it from the recollection system's innards.

Once Gregory had finished cleaning the sixth floor lavatories, he looked at his e-tablet and checked the time. Ten minutes past eleven, according to ship time, it would be lunch break soon. He quickly ticked off the two tasks that he had done, and the ship's central computer reminded him that one more "FTL-Ready" task remained. He then noticed that a new section had appeared on his e-tapossiblityblet. Under a section title "Personnel affairs" he found a new task "Medical Checkup" that had been scheduled in the afternoon. That, Gregory thought to himself, was unfortunate. It was Gregory's sixth week at EmCeeEsCee and that meant that he would need a medical. He wasn't sure it was a company policy or a interstellar regulation that corporations were forced to following. Knowing, EmCeeEsCee, Gregory thought the latter more likely. It had been six weeks since he had left a ship on Mars. Six weeks since he had left his home. He wondered whether he had received any messages from them since waking up. With twenty minutes to go before lunch, and not wanting to get started with taking inventory in the cargo hold he though to himself that he had earned a early break. He would have enough time after lunch, and before the FTL-Ready deadline, to finish his task (even with the medical checkup).

Gregory went back to level 2, and into his personal cabinet. His left hand unlocked the door, and he crawled into his personal space. The air was cold there. Before getting too close to his bed, which was quite tricky in zero g, he quickly swapped clothes. He didn't want any nasties to get into his bed. He then quickly latched himself to his mattress (to have some comfort in his aching back). He checked the display on the nightstand, and saw that still, no new message had arrived. He started to get really anxious, the silence from his family was bothering him. He wondered if they were all right.

From a small locker in the wall he got his own personal netmachine. It was slightly larger than his e-tablet, but the difference was that it was his. It wasn't owned, and operated by, M. Cosa and that had a very good reason. Crew were allowed to take a small bit of mass with them. For low-ranking crew like him, that meant less than 1.5 kilograms. His netmachine weighed more than half of that, so that meant only a few hundred grams remaining for his other affairs. But it was worth it. At least, that was what he had hoped. Personal netmachines were allowed by EmCeeEsCee but they were not authorized to access any of the ship's core systems. In other words, it had access to the ships data drives (as did his e-tablet) but not to the ship's propulsion system. Luckily, he didn't need to. One disadvantage of having a personal netmachine was that it did not get access to the fast network that his e-tablet got access to. From his netmachine, he accessed the ship's knowledge archives looking for information from Mars. A war was brewing in the northern regions of the red planet and he was afraid that they were having to get off-planet to avoid getting caught up in the conflict. One megacorp, the Kawadisu Corporation, had claimed land on the dusty surface in the hope to find precious materials underneath it, but another megacorp, MayflowerX, had also claimed a stake in that area, unbeknownst to the fine gentlemen at Kawadisu. So the two of them were casually waging economic war on each other, but tensions were high and people were afraid that the situation could escalate into an actual war, with actual military combat. It had been ages since military combat occurred planet-side, but that didn't mean that no planet-side war could ever happen in the near future. Luckily, none of his family were related to either of the two megacorps, so it didn't affect them that much. Still, with the tensions on Mars being as high as it is, it had been hard for his family to trade and keep their fresh food supply stocked the past few week due to the blockades that had been set up around the planet. Gregory browsed through the ship's archives, and didn't find anything noteworthy that had happened since last he checked, at least as far as the ship's archive was concerned. Maybe something had happened, but it might not have reached the ship yet. Or, so Gregory thought, there was also the possibility that EmCeeEsCee were blocking access to certain data sources. However, EmCeeEsCee wasn't a megacorp, and was mostly independent, so he had no reason to expect it. Still, he didn't reject the possibility.

Satisfied with what he had read — or rather, satisfied that nothing noteworthy had happened at Mars — he closed all applications on his netmachine. He checked the time and saw that lunch was going to be ready in around 10 minutes. That left him around 6 minutes to waste. He quickly activated a file named t_expl.scm on the netmachine's main page. In just mere seconds, the complete interface of the netmachine changed. He had activated a secret profile on his machine which was not accessible without activating the script. Gregory was employed by the M. Cosa Shipping Corporation, but that didn't mean that he wasn't allowed any extra-curricular activities. He re-opened his browser and was now greeted with an entirely different interface. Instead of being limited to the ship's data archives, and a few other non-essential systems, he now had access to all the other ship systems (or at least, the majority of them). He saw that — like the guys in blue shirts were talking about earlier this morning — there was indeed a malfunction with the ship's near-field communication system. As far as he knew, the malfunction would not disrupt communications with mars, but any local relay systems could maybe have prohibited. However, he expected that that system was mostly used to communicate with other ships in the nearby area. He saw that the antenna was scheduled to be fixed in the early afternoon. Some lucky guy or gal was going to get a free space walk. However, he did not have t_expl.scm installed just to check up on the ship's maintenance log, his e-tablet sufficed (although, with the current parameters, he would be able to view a lot more additional details, if he wanted to). The script was only able to read information he wasn't supposed to have any access to. It was undetectable: the script meanly acted as a relay proxy to scrape any passing network activity, and pieced together from all the flowing pieces of data whatever the ship was doing. Gregory was looking for any other ships in the area. His targets. But the malfunction would sure disrupt him from knowing which other ships would be around the Symble Entity. He had to know it for his plan to succeed.

In the past few weeks, Gregory had devised a plan that would make him rich. He hadn't always been a space janitor. The only reason that he was doing janitorial activities was that it gave him access to large sections of the ship. With it, he was able to make use of M. Cosa's vast shipping activities. He wasn't doing any industrial espionage. He was not looking for any of M. Cosa's corporate secrets. He was simply leasing their infrastructure. First rule that Gregory established: don't cause any hindrance to your contractual employer. He knew that if anyone on the ship would figure out what he was doing, that it wouldn't take long for him to get fired and consequently put into "space jail". He actually wasn't sure what M. Cosa (or any of his subordinates) would do, and he wouldn't ask around to make sure. Gregory acted like a spider: hidden behind the wall, waiting for any prey to come close to him. In this case, the wall was the ship he was on and his prey were the other ships navigating through the solar system and beyond. They were getting close to a Symble Entity, an FTL Beacon. Space was mostly empty. Getting close to other ships, even around a celestial body as busy as Saturn, was a very rare occurrence. The exception to that rule were Symble Entities.

A Symble Entity was a physical device that allowed ships to travel at perceivingly impossible speeds: faster-than-light. Ships equipped with the right hardware were able to syncronise with said entity to carefully, at the right time and angle, be accelerated to super fast speeds to travel to other systems in mere seconds. As a janitor, he wasn't sure to which system they were going to travel to, but that didn't matter. Activating a Symble Entity, for many ships, was often a long and lengthy process. The quantum-magnetic fields that a Symble Entity generated were hard to predict, and missing a certain field configuration required a ship to wait a long time until another favorable field would be generated again. Ships sometimes had to wait days to get accelerated by a Symble Entity. That was a long time, but nothing compared to conventional travel to said systems, so it was always worth the wait. These long waits meant that a lot of ships were often around a Symble Entity, waiting for their destination to become available. And that was what Gregory was anticipating. A lot of ships, a lot of targets.

Of course, with the antenna malfunction, he would not be able to check which other ships would be around the Symble Entity. This morning he saw that there were a few, but without that ship system being functioning, he could not do anything. His script allowed him, for now, to only read any network traffic (even traffic that was not intended to be passed to his netmachine), he would not be able to fix or bypass the system. Gregory wasn't even sure if that were possible.

He checked the clock again, eleven forty. Lunch time had started. Just as before, in the morning, when his eyes were barely able to keep open, he crawled out of his cabinet, and veered off towards the level 2 break room. Follow the arrows. Before he arrived to the break room, the ship announced that it would start decelerating with five loud beeps. Slowly, the freefall subsumed and Gregory had to make sure that he would land on the floor. They had gained negative gravity as now the ship's floor was aligned in the opposite way. Space travel was confusing.

Gregory walked through the big portal that separated the break room from level 2's central corridor. He saw that Khervan had already arrived. Lunch time was only 30 minutes and he had already wasted 15. He shouldn't have used his netmachine for so long. "What took you so long?", Khervan asked when he saw that Gregory had arrived. Khervan had already finished his plate of Kafk Meat and Blister Beans.