Techies and Their Tech

[Mr.Ling]

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To the naked eye, it was a masterpiece of vernacular military design. An artwork of necessity painted with the brush of endurance. To the augmented eye, however, it was a horror from beyond. Nothing flowed together evenly. The powercore delivered a high, coarse, unfettered yield to a set of internal equipment that demanded refined energy. Once he glanced to the external equipment, he saw a familiar dense heap of code. Ling was vaguely familiar with Core tech, and this wasn't Core tech. His attention was drawn specifically to the shielding array. It was actively modifying it's neighboring equipment. It had converted the thruster already, and seemed to be prodding at some shipboard A.I. that was mostly inactive. He began running an authentication loop, and it came back positive. He'd found gmu:flr:sd:gvt:mk10 sooner than he thought he would. And whatever it was doing was active adaptation.

Ling took off his sunglasses. One amber eye and one purple augment didn't break eye-contact with the ship, and a light spooling could be heard as he disabled the undervolting on his augment. Holograms were projected from the implant, a heads-up display of sorts, but it was quickly becoming far denser than any such display would need. As another two more layers of information began streaming, and he was sure that his failsafes were set, he began his first play. Active adaptation was always one of two things: A.I., or a really long string of else-if statements. He knew how to figure out.

Beginning as he usually does, he simply followed stray lines until their termination. It wasn't enough to gain access, but it was enough to grab the program's attention. It temporarily dismissed him as low-priority, it seemed to have realized that he was trying to confirm it's cognizance. Once it finally directly blocked him, he tracked it's source, and introduced a completely empty trojan. It reacted, first in panic, second in relief, third in retaliation, and fourth in realizing it's mistake. It tried to return to imitating a machine, but Ling had already catalogued it.

With a smirk and a raised eyebrow, he turned to Caliban. "Did'ja know your shield has an A.I.? Particularly aggressive one, too."

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