Alexis dropped down from the skylight, landing silently onto the gleaming spotless floor of the facility. So far, her infiltration had gone without a hitch. The security system was running a peacekeeping program of her own design, and would erase itself after she had finished her work here. She still had to stop briefly to interface with another level of security, or a different type of passcode door. It made sense that the facility had several layers of redundancy when it came to security, as the recent rumours surrounding the technology in development here made it a target for anyone in the world of corporate espionage.
But Alexis was among the best, and the tech, as varied as it was, couldn't hold up to her analytical and nanobot enhanced mind. Another door, this one with an iris scanner. Alexis ran a data cord out from her utility belt. One end she attached into the debugging port on the security panel. The other, she plugged into the side of her head, underneath a patch of hair that disguised her interface.
Most people in the developed world at least had some manner of brain interface, as embedded technology was the growing fashion of the 21st century. Of course, most people were limited by commercial brand VR and mindscape technology, but Alexis used state of the art military grade software. It helped to be ex CIA, and doubly helped to be well connected. Alexis wasn't even her civilian name, it was an alias for a being that existed only in the dark depths of forbidden places.
Her mind parried with the security door interface, and after bypassing some sloppy verification code, convinced the system that the precisely expected data sequence had been entered as if the head scientist, Dr Bodenstein, had just placed his eye to the sensor.
The door opened with a low hum of the operating servo. Such a thing as the door opening would of course be logged in the central security computer, but that particular system was due to contract a data wiping virus at around sunrise, and would tragically need to be restored to last night's backup. More's the pity, thought Alexis, smiling.
She caught a reflection of her active camouflage as she passed some mirrored windows in the clean research division. Her complement of a trillion nanobots had altered the pigment of her skin, the color of her hair, and some fine details of her facial features, so that she appeared to be a strikingly beautiful Japanese woman with dark purple hair braided into a neat pigtail. In her sleek black cat-suit, she had to admit she looked rather hot. With a single thought, she saved the current appearance configuration for her own personal enjoyment later.
A small voice of unease spoke at the back of her head. It wasn't that it had been too easy. Much the opposite, the security system was immense, and only herself and a handful of other individuals on the planet were properly equipped to be able to succeed in this mission. It was just that nothing unexpected had happened. Usually there was a stray guard off his usual patrol route for some reason, or else a door with an upgraded security protocol that had somehow been missed on the building plans. But this run had been to the letter so far. Alexis sighed and reassured herself that it was ok to just enjoy it for the few times that actually happened.
Her target was in the clean research division, so she was close. She brought up the facility plans in her visual field, and a holographic wireframe layout of the building appeared in front of her, visible only to her. Two lefts and then the end of the corridor. One guard scheduled to be after the first left, coming towards her.
She stopped before the corner and listened. There was nothing for a couple of minutes, but then sure enough, the heavy footsteps of a guard who had no sense in preserving the eerie quiet came stomping down the corridor towards her ears. She broke the security on one of the nearest labs and hid inside until the guard had traipsed past her, with the look of someone playing a game through his ocular implants, if his random stabs and swipes at the air in front of him with his fingers were any indication. With the coast clear, she left her hiding place and proceeded unhindered to her final destination.
One last security door stood in her path, as was to be expected. This one had a triple security feature that required simultaneous activation in order to avoid tripping any countermeasures or lighting up alarms throughout the entire facility. Appreciating a decent challenge, Alexis got to work, analyzing and developing new code for each authorization but without directly interfacing yet. It took more time that she anticipated, and it was when a guard was within five minutes of walking past this corridor that she finally had all the code she needed. Interfacing again from her skull but splitting the output three ways, she had to use both hands and a foot to click the output cables into all three security panels at once. With less than a tenth of a second in difference for each interface connection, she was able to execute her custom code and open the door as planned. She quickly stepped through as she heard the footsteps of the approaching guard in the distance, and the door closed quietly behind her.
She exhaled deeply. This was it. It was a circular, almost empty room. The floor and ceiling were both paneled in black chrome, dimly lit by a few low energy lights. On a round raised platform in the center was a plastic carry case, about the size of a large suitcase. Around the perimeter of the room were several cameras, which she had expected. The security tapes wouldn't last through the night, so that wasn't a problem. She wasn't expecting the 50″ screens and heavy duty speakers though. There must have been about a dozen of each, equally spaced around the circular wall. They weren't on any plans, or in her informant's dossier of the room's security measures. Part of her just wanted to grab the case and go, but another part insisted she show some due diligence for potential countermeasures here.
She scanned the screens and speakers with all her enhanced human senses and the nanobot implants spread throughout her head. It was as she feared... There were subliminal signals coming from the screens, and from the speakers. The strange thing was that Alexis couldn't isolate the frequency to allow her to save and replay whatever messages she was being hammered with at a speed she could read and hear. The frequency seemed to be scrambled, and ever changing, so that even her advanced implants couldn't pin them down, and every time they tried to record the message, they got garbled code or static.
Maybe she could try running a full spectrum scan on one of the screens at a time... Wait, no! Every second she spent in the room with those devices, her subconscious was being bombarded with hidden suggestions, or external thoughts trying to masquerade as her own. She had to finish the mission and get out quickly, or find a way to disable all of them at once. A quick glance at the circuitry of the nearest speaker told Alexis that the latter option would either take too much time or trip an alarm that would have a dozen guards on her within moments. She instead went up to the box and gripped the handles, ready to lift.
Alexis hesitated. What if this box was just a decoy? Yes, it made sense that they would put all these subliminal signal devices here to bombard her with the suggestion that this is the real tech, that way she would take it and discover when she got back to her hideout that is was nothing but a box of tin cans or something.
Grinning, she thought she wouldn't be manipulated so easily. She had to open the box here and double check that the technology was there as expected. She could see now that her original plan of just grabbing it and leaving was badly flawed, and she congratulated herself for catching it.
The locking mechanism on the crate proved difficult for Alexis to crack though. It had a time scrambled code that changed every four seconds. There was a pattern to the code change, a key even, but Alexis would have to hook up the hex-core processor unit in her head to brute force her way in. And that would take time. Possibly beyond her allowed mission time, even.
She had no choice though. She could feel a strong urge to take the package now and leave quickly, but she was fairly certain that was a thought being delivered to her by the subliminal messages. Actually, wasn't the original mission plan to take the crate without checking the contents? She thought it was, but could she trust that memory anymore?
Dammit, she was compromised, wasn't she? Her thoughts were being invaded relentlessly by the screens and speakers emitting their invisible and inaudible suggestions. The normal mission protocol here would be to abort.
Yes, she should abort. Get out now, before the subliminal countermeasures did anything more serious to her mind.
