Re: The Show Must Go Off

[Herr D]

At the same time that I was ‘chatting’ with my virtual contact and pretending to not get involved, I goosed an Enforcer sub-routine to find another chatbox. One I’d deliberately seeded to include chat between virtual acquaintances Y.W.N. and The Shade. They discussed the possibility of framing the Enforcers for the quake, fixing a door, etc., and that all three suspects lived in one of the two hallways-worth of dead. I made the chatbox appear to have been opened in the jumper landing bay we’d just been seen leaving. The cameras recorded us leaving, then looped around to show the whole two-shift day yesterday and right up to us leaving again. The hook I left was an Enforcer Utility Bot, or EUBIE, as they called them in those days, marching up to the kiosk. In reality it had never moved–with the clean lines of a EUBIE, it was easy to fake video and add shadow, etc.
Most successful criminals avoid panicking the authorities. I needed to divert them if they were going to skip monitoring a hundred droids without asking questions. Most of the hackware I wrote that day was about not getting noticed. I actually automated digital footage serial number replacement so I could have one droid go back over it’s own tracks in footage, pretending to do the work of five without getting noticed. This routine would only last from my twenty-third day to maybe my twenty-sixth if I was lucky. The panic was well underway when I left Jenko’s, claiming I was going to see Chugger. I got less than ten paces out the door before the shakedown commenced.

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