From the moment Beck broke the treeline she was sprinting, pushing herself to her limit to cross the mansion grounds as quickly as possible. Adrenaline pumped through her, and she welcomed the extra strength. Despite all her planning and preparation, she was in danger, and the best way to keep safe was to get inside as fast as she could. She only had about thirty seconds until the next sensor sweep. Despite the danger, the thin, wiry girl grinned a wolfish grin. She loved feeling alive.
With seconds at most to spare, Beck reached the walls of the palatial mansion that rose high in the middle of the spacious grounds. She immediately pressed herself tight against the stone, and waited for the tell-tale flicker of sensor lights to pass. Once they did, and no alarm triggered, she allowed herself a laugh. A vulnerability, just as she'd been informed. With luck, the rest of her intel was good too. It had certainly cost enough, but to Beck no price was too high for the chance to screw over a corp. SPQ Conglomerate was one of the worst. Everyone knew the kinds of shady dealings and unethical practices they were tied up in, but due to their political influence and inordinate wealth they were untouchable. The injustice of it made Beck rage. She'd seen what SPQ had done to the poor part of the city she'd grown up in. Between their pollution and their recruiting of the hopeless and helpless for illegal human experimentation, they'd killed hundreds, and ripped the heart out of her entire neighbourhood. It had always been rough and dirty, but it had had a heartbeat.
A life. A vibrancy. Not anymore. That was why, for the first time in her life, Beck had left the megacity she'd been born in, and traveled to a remote country house. Revenge. It was what she was best at. Beck prided herself as one of the best off-the-grid hackers most people had never heard of. She wasn't the kind to go on the extranet and brag about her exploits, only to get picked up by a corporate task force two weeks later. She kept things quiet and professional, despite her aggressively punk appearance. As always, Beck was wearing her black battle vest over a simple tank top, and baggy black pants with dozens of pockets for all the gear she might need. The skin she was showing on her arms was covered in tattoos, and she had a pierced lip, nose and eyebrow. She'd never been one to shy away from a few body mods - the jagged metal of bootlegged tech-implants showing through her skin in several places was proof of that.
Now that she was past the sensor grid, Beck got to work finding the drain pipe she'd noticed on the building holo-plans. It led up to a window with a nearby external system access panel, probably intended for maintenance use. Access points like those hardly ever had any meaningful security. Beck had hardly been able to believe it when she'd noticed the flaw on the plans. It wasn't like such a huge corp go get so lazy, but at the same time, it was so perfectly like them to be so arrogant as to assume no-one would ever try to hit them in such a place: the personal country home of one of their most senior executives. According to her intel, as an executive, Evelynn Aurelia had a hard-wired connection between her residence and SDQ headquarters back in the city. If Beck could access that connection on her end, she'd easily be able to get her hands on all kinds of insider information, and hopefully that would include something obscene enough that, just for once, the politicians and corrupt media wouldn't be able to ignore it.
Beck found the drain pipe. Climbing it was easy for lower-rung city rat like her. Once she was thirty feet in the air, she started feeling at the stonework around her for the access panel. It didn't take long to find, and it didn't take much longer to pry the panel open to expose a small console. Using only her legs to grip the pipe she was clinging to, Beck reached a hand behind her head and felt her way down her spine until she reached her central implant. Then, she sent a mental command to open it and release her jack. She quickly pulled it out of herself, the thin wire unraveling until it was long enough for her to reach across to the access panel and jack herself in. Beck couldn't help shuddering briefly as she felt her mind opening itself up to a brand new system, interfacing with all its protocols and functions. There was security, of course, but Beck breezed past it. She came from a rough part of the city, and looked like it, but her cyberbrain augmentations were top-of-the-line, at least for the black market. She could perform trillions of calculations per second, enough to deal with all but the best encryption. In an instant, the system was hers. She only needed it for one thing: opening a window.
With the agility of a monkey, Beck clambered into the window. Just as expected, the room she found herself in was nothing more than a spare bedroom, dark and empty. With nothing more than a thought, Beck closed the window behind her and switched on the lights. It was easy, now that she'd tapped into the system. It was just like a rich corper to have everything integrated, despite how insecure it was. Beck grinned to herself. She wasn't one to get cocky on the job, but so far everything had been going perfectly to plan. Beck crept out of the bedroom and looked around. From the detailed building plan she had downloaded to her memory she already knew where she was, but she'd learned the value of not taking anything for granted. She needed to find Aurelia's office. It wasn't marked as such on any of the intel she'd received, but she'd identified a few likely candidates. Fortunately, as far as she could tell the mansion was empty, so she had plenty of time to search. Beck made her way along the corridor and down the staircase to the first floor. As she did, she couldn't help but marvel at her own surroundings. It was like she'd stepped into a previous century. The whole interior of the building was lined with real wood panels, the carpet on the floor was as soft as velvet, and the light fittings looked like they were covered with diamonds. The opulence was tasteful, though, rather than overwhelming. The degree of wealth it represented was obscene, yes, but Beck couldn't help finding it beautiful as she walked down the magnificent staircase and into a large, high-ceilinged room dominated by a huge mahogany table with an open fireplace at one end.
As she was walking across the room, Beck froze.
She didn't mean to freeze, and at first she thought it was some kind of instinctive response, or perhaps a consequence of her own distractedness. But no. She couldn't move. She was held in place, mid-step, her muscles locked up and unresponsive. Surprise turned into confusion, turned into fear. This was very, very wrong. Beck focused all her energy on trying to lift just one foot, but she couldn't. Something had paralyzed her from the neck down.
"Welcome!" announced a refined, feminine, authoritative voice. "I must admit, you're earlier than I expected."
The figure of a woman emerged from the doorway Beck had been heading towards. She was taller than Beck, which wasn't hard - everyone was taller than Beck - but it wasn't that which lent her such a domineering presence. She had a full figure and was wearing a floor-length yet revealing red dress, and she moved like someone who'd never needed to make space for anyone else in her life. Beck knew straight away who she was: Evelynn Aurelia.
"What the fuck did you do to me?" Beck snarled. She knew that if Aurelia had been expecting her then she was almost certainly in extreme danger, but she also knew better than to show any fear.
"New tech," Miss Aurelia replied. She made a small gesture with her hand, and the wood panels on the wall next to Beck slid away to reveal a set of emitters thrumming with energy. "A little something we've been working on. A disruptive energy frequency targeted at the cybernetic enhancements you have in your spine. It intercepts all the signals your cyberbrain is trying to send to your muscles. Quite effective, don't you think?"
"Fuck you," Beck spat. She hated everything Aurelia represented, from her arrogance to her educated, upper-crust accent.
Miss Aurelia just laughed. "I suppose you must be wondering how I knew you were coming?"
"Let me go, you fucking corper!" Beck screamed, but despite her defiance, she was curious.
"How eloquent," Miss Aurelia commented. "Let me make it simple for you: you were being played."
That took the wind out of Beck's sails. "What?"
