2012-10-03: Land Without Secrets

Players:

Theo_icon.jpg

Summary: Theo dives into the information superhighway, searching for the Church of Humanity and the lost mutants.

Date: Wednesday, October 3, 2012. 1:33pm.

Log Title: Land Without Secrets

Rating: PG


Westchester - Mills Road

Leading away from the hustle and bustle of Salem Center, Mills Road turns into a long, winding, barely lit road leading to the more remote areas of Westchester. The road is surrounded by a think, woodsy area, except a few areas cleared for the estate homes of the wealthy.


The easy part. Finding the ISP main server building. The nice part about small towns such as Westchester is that such things don't tend to have a remarkable amount of security. The brick building has no windows, but that's no concern to Theo. He doesn't even need to go inside. He just needs to be near the servers so that he can tap straight into the internet lines. Normally he would do this from the comfort of his room or a Starbucks, but given the fact that the CoH has managed to capture Quenton, someone he regards as a hard target, he doesn't want to take any chances with what they might have to track his movements. The tiny silver Ferarri pulls into the worn parking lot, grass growing up between the cracks in the pavement, and Theo puts the car in park. It is far from a grand entry. The car is shut off, and Theo uses his powers to flip on Proto. "Okay, Proto, here we go. You get to be my pack mule today. You ready for this?" The small standby light blinks to life, and Theo closes his eyes.
He starts identifying the dozens of electronics on the other side of the brick wall, and he mutes them one by one in his mind as he isolates the server. There it is… He dives in, his mind reaching through the wiring and circuitry until it becomes the new world around him. The information Superhighway. The land without secrets.

A world of zeros and ones swirls around Theo as information is being passed back and fourth at rapid speed, data that makes up pictures of cats, pornography, videos, political messages, personal information, stock quotes and so much more flies by him as he looks for that specific door, the one that will get him the information he needs. It's like driving through a city, one could easily get lost in the mass of information and doorways. Lucky for Theo, he knows where to go and what he's looking for, he finds a door way with the keywords he's looking for - Church, Friends, Humanity, Mutant and blocking the way is a locked door - password protected and guarded by two figures who seem to be made of nothing by binary.

Theo zips along on a construct of a motorcycle, down through the roads until he reaches the door. "Hah, a password," he comments. A few moments later, a floating egg-shaped device arrives behind him. Proto's presence in the world. The cycle decomposes into the signal, and Theo chooses to start with a more discrete form of hacking. His hand forms what appears to be a computer screen, and he starts to isolate the binary code that makes up the two figures guarding the door, searching to discern the password before he passes by.

The guards aren't easily isolated as he realizes it's all part of the same code as the password, but the numbers fall into place in a pattern of - 0100011001101100011000010111010001110011011000110110000101101110 and the door is unlocked and the two guards stand aside as their programmed to let by those with the password. Once inside it's a small network of computers, data files here and there about various things the Church of Humanity has stored. Shortly after entering though what appears to be nothing but a wall of binary repeating the same numbers over and over again - 01100110011010010111001001100101 - a large wall of fire.

Theo walks by the guards and into the room, and stops once he is on the other side of the door, closing it and locking it behind him. "Okay Proto, let's see what we can find. The binary screen disappears and his other hand forms a fire extinguisher. "Let's put out this fire. He points it at the fire, and sprays a series of 0's at the wall, changing all of the 1's until there is a zero value to the entire wall. "To think, I used to consider all the computer stuff complicated."

It takes considerable amount of effort on Theo's behalf and he'd feel the strain on his powers as he starts to put out the firewall. Once it's down it's an open door not just to Theo but anything else out there in the internet, and it sounds like something is trying to come in behind him but the two guards are currently fighting it. As soon as Theo steps past where the firewall was, he would feel a tingle across his body from being scanned. In front of him a large blue fortress appears - Halt! You do not belong here! Prepare for Quarantine! - More guard looking figures start to pour out of the fortress as the system believes Theo to be a virus!

Theo was just enjoying a nice victory over the firewall when The blue fortress appears. "Oh great," he mutters. "That's what I get for being cocky." The only way to get the system to stop searching for a virus is for the system to catch a virus. He looks around at the guards pouring out of the virus, and slaps his chest, then reaches out to try to slap the chest of the first guard that reaches him. The intent is to paste his profile onto the first guard that appears, tricking the system into thinking that the guard is the virus instead of Theo. 01010110 01101001 01110010 01110101 01110011 00001101 00001010.

The profile copies onto the guard but instead of going after just the guard now, it starts to go after both of them thinking that Theo is some sort of Trojan. One of the guards reaches out and touches the the duplicate with a sort of rod with a static aura about it. There's a scream as the rod touches, but it sounds more like the sounds of a dial up modem, as zeros and ones flake off of him until he's nothing. A few of the guards start to advance towards Theo and one of those rods is starting to get awfully close.

Theo backpedals away from the guards. "Well, that worked beautifully," he growls. His left hand forms a rod of his own, reading the properties on the guards and copying it, and his right arm forms a shield, raising it up to deflect the rod. "Boy am I glad that I took Emma's mental defense class." There must be something wrong, he actually just was grateful for Emma Frost. There's a first time for everything. "Proto, go start accessing the files, see what you can find about the kidnapped students!" The egg floats away, down the data corridors to start searching. The thought occurs to him that he needs to re-engage the firewall if he wants to hold this off for long, but for the moment he takes a swing at the closest guard with his rod.

The shield takes the hit and instantly is devolved into pixels before going away to nothing. The rod swings and dissolves the guard as the fight continues, more guards trying to eliminate the threat to the computer. With Theo keeping Security Essentials busy, Proto starts zipping from networked system to networked system and there are two files he's able to find, both video, that pertain to anything with the kidnapped students. The two files were both email attachments sent from moc.ytinamuhoc|ekirtsdnarever#moc.ytinamuhoc|ekirtsdnarever to an email address moc.yitnamuhoc|gertnatum#moc.yitnamuhoc|gertnatum, the terminal proto's found the information at is located somewhere in the midwest.

Theo keeps mild attention on what Proto is accessing, though he is mostly occupied. "Okay, time to get out of here." He rushes back to grab the floating image of Proto, developing a makeshift firewall and igniting it behind him. It won't last long, but he hopes it will hold long enough to open the filepath and escape to the other terminal.

It's a quick thing, as soon as Theo and Proto are reunited and the makeshift firewall holds just long enough for the two of them to slip out, the files now stored in Proto.

In a computer in the midwest, at one of the safehouses for the Friends of Humanity, a virus is rapidly running through their systems, crashing the network luckily hiding any trail that Theo was ever there.

Theo stands in the filepath, much less busy than the information highway, like a desolate country road in the internet. He logs the path and what computers it leads to from the midwest computer, and stores it in Proto to find the locations of the branch locations that have received the information. "Good job, Proto. Good boy."

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