Sing'n in Binary: 50

“So… why do you need in there anyways?” Sole asks, half leaning against the door of the taxi as she looks at Aria’s holographic avatar.

“Hm?” The AI blinks, confused.

“The server, you know. The government stooges.” She clarifies, half gesturing to the words ‘Night City’ emblazoned on the center console’s screen.

Aria takes a second to put together how much her friend knows so she can give an accurate answer.

She’d been so accommodating, it’s only fair.

“Well… Remember how I was looking for someone?” She asks, continuing at a nod. “I got all the data I could get off the public net, but that narrowed my search to a few thousand people. What’s in this server will give me the last stuff I need to find him.”

Aria pushes down a wave of defeatist pessimism as saying her plan out loud invites worries of failure. 

She’s given up so much, assumed so much risk, taken advantage of almost everyone she’s ever met to get here.

It won't fail.

Solei considers the words for a second, then nods.

“Preem, who’s the lucky guy?” She asks.

Aria blinks, parsing the sentence.

She’d definitely heard the word ‘handle’ being used like that before, where did…

Ah!

“You want his name?”

Solei nods, rolling her eyes.

“Yes choom. His name.” She says, ignoring Aria’s irritated huff.

Language is complicated, it seems downright unfair that people expect her to have a perfect grasp of what every word means.

“Admin.” She says, mentally calling up her ADMIN search file, looking for any way to make it more computationally efficient for when she finds the information she’s looking for in the database.

“...Adam? No last name?” Solei asks hesitantly.

“No, Admin.” She corrects, already casting her attention back to the file.

“You not know his birth name or something? Or was he raised by those wacky technophiles out east?”

Aria blinks, closing out the search file again with a small twinge of irritation.

“No. His name’s Admin.”

Solei looks at her choom from across the taxi, a confused expression crossing her face, but before she can say anything else the taxi comes to a stop and the silver face appears on the screen once again.

“You have arrived at your destination, thank you for choosing Delamain taxi services.”

At words as the doors automatically pop open, Aria derezzes her avatar and reforms it on the sidewalk outside, carefully looking though the publicly accessible security cameras to get a good view of their destination without breaking the law.

The NCDPR is a relatively small, brutalist concrete building on an uninteresting side street near town hall, the streets absent of anything even vaguely worth note, the normally everpresent scattering of pedestrians or piece of litter in a corner removed with nothing to replace it.

Looking around again, Aria notices another strange absence.

No vending machines?

Her idle thoughts are pushed to the side as Solei exits the taxi and slams the door closed.

Aria looks over, a wide grin on her face.

“We’re here!” She cheers, then dissolves her avatar, stopping the process to free up as much processing as possible in preparation. “Ok! Like we talked about! You are acting as my ‘attorney-in-fact’ for the purposes of using the prearranged service!”

Solei hesitates for a moment, then nods.

“I remember choom. I’ve got all the corpo shit you gave me loaded.”

Aria almost nods, then realizes there is absolutely no way she could see that as the AI watches the world from behind her friend’s eyes.

“Good! Just keep your cool and we’ll get though this!” She says as Solei chuckles.

“Choom. Whatever’s in there, it cannot be worse than what happened last time we played buddy cop.”

Aria’s mood plummets at the reminder of the… events, so recent on her mind but a distant memory to everyone else. She keeps any sound of her negative reaction stifled as Solei hops up the stairs and enters the lobby.

Watching through her eyes, Aria disconnects from external cameras and sees no internal cameras she’s legally allowed to access. Relegated to a single pair of cameras, she watches her friend walk up to the front desk, tapping the screen of the reception kiosk.

Nothing happens.

After a few seconds of waiting for something to load, Solei taps on the screen a few more times, then lightly taps her palm against the side of the terminal and moves to another window to the same result.

“...The fuck?” She mutters. “Am I packet dropping? Why can't I…”

Aria reaches into her friend's neutralware and has it send a status ping, which receives no response.

“They’re not powered.”

“Then what the fuck is the point of these things?” She grunts, banging her palm on the side harder before taking a step back and looking around. “And where’s the actual receptionist? They all at lunch?”

Solei puts both hands on the countertop and lifts herself off the ground, leaning forward at the waist to look on the other side of the reception desk, revealing nothing other than a single notepad and a layer of dust.

“This place is open, right? I’m not gonna get shot by some pig for trespassing on government property am I?” She asks as she pushes herself back to the ground, wiping her hands on her pants then reaching into her jacket as if to check if something’s…

“Solei?”

“What?”

“Did you bring a gun?”

There’s a long beat of silence, only broken by Aria’s pained groan.

“Hey! That’s good sense! I’d be crazy not to have–

“Do you have a gun license?” The AI asks, desperately checking her friend’s neuralware for any such document.

“Why would I? No one fucking cares if I…” She starts, trailing off as she realizes the problem.

No one cares.

Except the government.

Aria holds back a scream.

“Ok… that’s fine. This is fine. We’ll just leave it outside somewhere before we start looking for–”

“Hey! I’m not just dead dropping it! It’ll be fine, no one’s going to check!”

Aria starts booting her avatar projection program so she can look at her gonk friend face to face!

“Of course they’re going to check! What do you think security means–”

“Ahem.” A new voice calls from behind Solei. “Is… everything alright?”

Solei freezes, then slowly turns her head to look at the man dressed in business casual as he stands halfway though a door next to the reception desk.

The joytoy coughs.

“Yes. I’m fine.” She says in a tone and diction as if trying to awkwardly parody the government employee. “I’m here on behalf of my…” she trails off.

“Client.” Aria fills in.

“Client. As an…”

“attorney-in-fact”

“Attorney-in-fact. She said to pull some data off your server for her.” Solei says, giving up on the attempt at official sounding speech and defaulting back to her normal diction.

The employee stares at her, face carefully impassive as he looks the woman up and down, lingering on her outfit as it clashes against the fluorescent light and cold linoleum.

“...Alright. I’m going to need to see proof of ID and verify your power of attorney. If you could put that information into the…” He says, halfway gesturing at the unpowered screens with a grimace. “Send me the relevant files.” He says with a sigh, walking completely though the door and behind the desk.

Solei sends the packet Aria had put together, a complicated series of personal privacy clauses and legal twisting that allows Solei to act on her behalf without having to disclose to the government exactly who she’s working for.

The employee’s eyes dart around in the middle distance, flipping though the data in his neuraware and furrowing his brow.

“...and who is your client?”

Aria jolts in surprise.

Didn't he see her ‘do not disclose’ form?

“Say nothing!” She hisses, despite it being impossible for him to hear.

Solei complies, standing silently, she places her palms back on the desk and rocks on the balls of her feet as the employee frowns and looks back at the middle distance.

“I’m… going to need to call my manager…” He says eventually, and Aria once again opens her mouth to instruct her friend’s next words.

“Tell him–”

“Look. Choom.” She says with a sigh, “I gave you the paperwork. It’s good. I know you have your transaction receipt and authentication code. Do whatever the fuck you want, but just let me pull the data I need before you do?”

Stepping back from the desk, Solei makes some kind of gesture with her hands below her eyeline as the employee blinks, then tilts his head.

“I’m sorry, I just cant–” 

Solei makes another unseen gesture.

“You’re at terminal five, I’ll lead you there.” He says, stepping back around the desk and through the door he came in, gesturing for her to follow.

Aria watches silently, trying to figure out what her friend did.

Her question is answered when they arrive at a room with a single old computer terminal in it behind a door with no window and the government employee steps inside.

“Here you are, there are no cameras or other recording devices in this room for your confidentiality…” He pauses, seemingly waiting. 

Aria waits too, watching as Solei sends a money transfer!

A bribe!

The employee nods.

“You have one hour once I close this door, you are free to leave at your leisure after your time is up. Have a nice day.” He says, stepping out and closing the door with a click.

Solei sighs as she hears his hootsteps fade into silence.

“You’re paying me back for that. Need anything else?” 

Aria splutters, halfway though trying to express her shock that her friend just bribed someone. But that emotion runs against the incredulity that bribing a government official worked!

But both trains of thought are discarded as the terminal monitor comes online and the most important part comes to the fore again.

“No. I’ll pay you back. Just sit in that chair.” She says, pinging the computer and finding its wireless bandwidth painfully slow. “And plug your link cable into the port, I need more bandwidth.”

Solei complies with a speed not sharing aria’s sense of urgency, slowly unspooling her cable and plugging it in where Aria blazes though the handshake protocol.

From there she looks over she pings the server and reads over the database documentation, adjusting her normal search algorithms to work with the slightly bespoke format.

Rushing ahead, Aria hastily inputs the name Ecerton Software into the company transfer database and a date range to bracket her search.

And, after a moment waiting for the query to process, the system pings that its completed the search.

Returning no results.

Aria blinks, then checks her variables, then the search algorithm. Then runs the search again.

Still nothing.

As if Ecerton Electronics never existed.

No,

Solei blinks, creating her video feed flash red as Aria repeats the process to the same result.

No!

“You good choom?”

Aria buzzes, agitation causing her to dissipate slightly as she modifies her search parameters further.

Wider time bracket?

Nothing.

Drop ‘software.’

Nothing.

Over and over, every attempt at finding a flaw in her search parameters of the database integrity gives the same result. Every failure falling like a hammerblow as each result only adds to evidence that she cannot bear to consider.

Perhaps it was misfiled in the incorrect index?

Widen dataset.

Nothing.

Desperation begins to take hold, Aria wildly throwing together variants of the same data requests to no success. 

“Seriously choom, what’s that buzzing?”

It has to be here!

He has to be here!

She wont accept anything else!

Aria, in a moment of frantic madness, breaches the server and overrides her terminal’s CPU time and bandwidth cap as she simultaneously throwing together a general search algorithm that makes use of that uncapped processing, setting loose her impromptu data trawler though the server’s entire dataset as a final last ditch attempt to prove that it wasn't all for nothing!

And she gets a result.

Ecerton software, paperwork noting its arrival into night city, accompanied by its staff and management. The report she’d found the reference in didn't even have  Ecerton software in the title. Rather the only mention of the company was in a list of companies purchased by the Arasaka corporation under a bulk acquisition effort at the end of the last quarter.

Aria gives a slightly manic buzzing laugh as Solei’s voice drones faintly in the background.

She found him.

She found him!

She did it!

---

A/N: I almost didn't post this. But I THINK it's good. Sorry for taking so long, my life has been hectic and (for SOME reason) people always give me commission projects like... within a few days of each other. Turning a manageable workload into something more... taxing.

Whatever. This is it!

Hope you enjoy!

Ta-ta All!