Chapter 114: [114]: Forging the Deal, Broken Chains
The heavy steel blast door of the bunker lay warped and ruined on the floor.
Sebastian stepped over the smoking metal with his heavy boots crunching against the scattered debris. The inside of the room was an absolute disaster. It looked like an electronics store had violently exploded inside a tiny concrete box.
There were half-built cybernetic limbs hanging from the ceiling and tangles of glowing copper wire strewn across the floor. Towers of empty coffee cups were stacked precariously on every available flat surface.
Standing in the dead center of the chaotic mess was Corbin.
The rogue code-smith was a thin and twitchy man wearing grease-stained overalls. He looked like he survived entirely on energy drinks and sheer paranoia. A cigarette trembled violently between his chapped lips. He stared at the ruined door and his wide eyes darted to Sebastian and finally to Gwen who was casually holstering her kinetic pistols behind him.
"Who the hell are you?!" Corbin panicked. His voice released a frantic and high-pitched squeak.
He took a stumbling step backward with his hands raised in surrender. "I didn’t do it! I didn’t slice the local credit network! I’ve just been fixing toasters! I swear!"
"I’m the IT guy," Sebastian smiled. It was a terrifying glint in his silver eyes that promised absolute violence if he didn’t get his way. "And I’m here to fix your hardware problem."
Corbin didn’t look reassured. In fact he looked like he was about to pass out. His gaze snapped to the smuggler standing in the doorway.
"Gwen!" Corbin shrieked and pointed a shaking finger at Sebastian. "Are you insane?! You brought a hostile Anomaly into my lab? The System is watching! The Senate hears everything! They’ll purge this entire sector just to get to him and they’ll take me down with him!"
"Corbin, take a breath before you pop a blood vessel," Gwen sighed. She leaned against the doorframe and crossed her arms. "I brought a client. A very rich and highly motivated client. He needs a Server Spoofing Drive. Premium quality. And he has the capital to pay for it."
"No! Absolutely not!" Corbin yelled and shook his head so violently his greasy hair whipped around his face. "I can’t build high-tier tech anymore! You know this Gwen! The Senate put a collar on me!"
Sebastian’s eyes narrowed. He looked closer at the twitchy mechanic.
A glowing red metallic device was bolted directly into the base of Corbin’s neck right over his upper spine. It looked like a heavy mechanical tick fused perfectly with his skin. Deep red mana lines spiderwebbed outward and dug directly into Corbin’s central nervous system.
[Item Identified: System Tracker]
[Grade: Administrator Punishment Tool]
[Status: Active]
"If I touch admin-level code," Corbin babbled as his hands hovered nervously over his own throat. "If I even try to access the deep rendering files required to build a Spoofing Drive that thing will trigger. It’ll fry my brain! It’ll turn my frontal lobe into liquid ash! Tell your client to screw off! I am closed for business!"
Sebastian didn’t have the patience for a paranoid hermit. He didn’t have the time to negotiate and he certainly didn’t have the time to go looking for another black market engineer in the Juncture. His real-world body back on Earth was currently relying on a massive and highly unstable dragon heart to keep a defensive dome active. He needed to get back.
He stepped forward. He didn’t drop into a fighting stance. He just walked right up to the terrified code-smith.
"Stay back!" Corbin yelped and reached for a heavy hydro-spanner on his desk.
Sebastian didn’t even flinch. His thirty percent physical synchronization made him incredibly dense. He reached out with his left hand and grabbed Corbin by the front of his stained overalls. He effortlessly lifted the man a foot off the ground.
"Put the wrench down man," Sebastian said with a completely deadpan voice. "Or I’m going to make you eat it."
CLANG!
Corbin dropped the tool instantly as it hit the metal floor. The code-smith whimpered and his legs kicked uselessly in the air.
"Sebastian, take it easy," Gwen warned from the doorway. "If his heart rate spikes too high the collar might register it as a hostile act and detonate anyway."
"I’m perfectly calm," Sebastian replied and turned his attention to the glowing red device bolted to Corbin’s spine.
"Please don’t kill me," Corbin sobbed as tears cut tracks through the grease on his face. "I just wanted to code in peace!"
"Shut up and hold still," Sebastian ordered.
He didn’t draw a weapon. He didn’t channel an explosive elemental spell. Magic wouldn’t solve this. The System Tracker was a piece of administrative hardware governed by the absolute laws of the Ethereal Plane. You couldn’t just smash it with a hammer. The fail-safe mechanism would instantly kill the host.
To beat a piece of administrative code you had to use administrative access.
Sebastian closed his eyes. He reached deep into the foundational architecture of his own glitched existence. He bypassed his massive health pool and ignored his ungodly strength stats to tap directly into the UI he had unlocked.
BING!
His vision shifted. The cluttered reality of the bunker melted away. The physical world was overwritten by cascading green lines of source code. Sebastian wasn’t looking at a terrified man in overalls anymore. He was looking at a complex directory of files and executable scripts.
He isolated the file path for the System Tracker.
[Target Acquired: System Tracker ID-8843]
[Current Hosted Entity: User ’Corbin’]
[Status: Monitoring]
"You see Corbin," Sebastian whispered as his physical voice echoed weirdly. "The System is rigid. It’s stupid. It doesn’t actually care who wears the collar. It just cares that the collar is attached to the assigned target ID."
In his mind Sebastian reached out with his multiplied processing speed. He grabbed the glowing red line of code that bound the tracker to the mechanic.
[Action Registered: Accessing Root Directory.]
[Nexus Glitch Activated: Bypass Security Firewalls.]
The system reacted in protest. Red warning labels flared across his vision and threatened him with immediate deletion for tampering with Senate property. Sebastian completely ignored them. The Legacy Code he had absorbed acted like an absolute skeleton key and casually turned off the alarms as fast as they triggered.
"So," Sebastian continued. His silver eyes snapped open and glowed with a terrifying light. "We just need to find a new volunteer."
Sebastian expanded his sensory network outward. He pushed his mind through the lead-lined walls of the bunker and into the tunnels outside.
He scanned the immediate area for a suitable replacement. It took him exactly two seconds to find one.
Down in the tunnels a massive mutated rat was happily chewing on a piece of rusted scrap metal.
Sebastian locked onto the creature’s digital footprint.
[Target Acquired: Irradiated Sewer Rat (Level 2)]
[Extracting Entity ID...]
"Let’s do a little hardware swap," Sebastian muttered.
With a brutal mental push Sebastian deleted Corbin’s user ID from the tracker’s target registry. Before the device could realize the host was missing and trigger the explosive charge Sebastian aggressively pasted the sewer rat’s entity ID into the blank slot.
[System Override Successful.]
[Target Updated.]
Sebastian let go of Corbin’s overalls.
The mechanic dropped to the floor and landed hard on his hands and knees. He gasped for air as his whole body shook in pure terror. He waited for the collar to bore into his brain. He waited for the agonizing shock of deletion.
Nothing happened.
CLICK. HISSSS.
A sharp hiss of pressurized air sounded from the back of Corbin’s neck. The heavy red metallic device suddenly went completely dark. The deep mana veins dug into his spine retracted.
The heavy metal collar simply detached and fell to the floor. It bounced off the toe of Sebastian’s boot with a dull thud.
Corbin froze. He slowly reached a trembling hand up to the back of his neck. He felt the punctured skin where the device had been bolted to him for three miserable years. He felt empty space.
"It’s gone," Corbin whispered. His voice was completely hollow and entirely devoid of comprehension. "You took it off. Without triggering the fail-safe."
Gwen let out a low whistle from the doorway. She walked over and kicked the dead collar. "I’ll be damned. You really are an Admin."
Corbin slowly looked up from the floor. He stared at Sebastian. The absolute paranoia in the code-smith’s eyes was entirely gone. It was replaced by a look of sheer reverence. He wasn’t looking at a ragged Drifter. He was looking at a digital savior.
"You hacked a Senate collar," Corbin breathed as tears freely spilled down his dirty cheeks. He scrambled forward and practically kissed Sebastian’s boots. "You actually hacked it! I’m free! I can code again! I can build!"
"Get off my shoes," Sebastian said and took a step back. He looked thoroughly annoyed by the display of emotion. "I didn’t do it out of the kindness of my heart. We had a deal. I took off your leash. Now you build my router."
Corbin scrambled to his feet and wiped his face with his sleeve. A manic grin spread across his face. The fearful hermit was gone. The master engineer was back online.
"A Spoofing Drive," Corbin laughed and clapped his hands together. "You want a Spoofing Drive! Boss I’ll build you the best damn drive in the Juncture! I’ll build a drive so clean the System will think you’re a localized patch update! I just need my tools! And caffeine! Lots of caffeine!"
"Get to work," Sebastian ordered and crossed his arms. "How long is this going to take?"
"To compile a disguise strong enough to bypass the firewall of an inner server like 112?" Corbin muttered. He was already sprinting toward a massive modified computer terminal in the corner of the room. His fingers began flying across the keyboards at blinding speed. "Give me two hours. I need to weave the local anomaly data with a generic NPC merchant profile."
"You have one hour," Sebastian corrected and walked over to the cracked leather couch to sit down. The physical strain of the deep code edit had spiked his exhaustion again. "I have a planet to save and I really want to take a nap."
"One hour! You got it Boss!" Corbin yelled. He was entirely consumed by his work.
Gwen walked over and leaned against the wall next to the couch. She looked down at the tired anomaly sitting in front of her.
"You know," Gwen noted with a small cynical smile on her face. "You make a habit of picking up broken strays. Me, the crazy dwarf you mentioned, and now the paranoid mechanic."
"Broken tools are easier to repurpose," Sebastian replied. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back. "They don’t ask questions when you point them at a target."
Gwen snorted softly. "Yeah. Well. Just don’t get too comfortable Seattle. Breaking that collar might have freed him but the System isn’t going to just ignore a sudden drop in an active tracking signal."
Sebastian didn’t open his eyes. "Let them come. I’m taking my break."