Digital Exodus Chapter 21

Okay, I have 3 chapters of this scheduled now with a release cadence of 1 every 5 days. I think I can keep this up tbh. It's feeling very doable- having patreon story posting every 5 days and public main story every 3 days. I hope this works for everyone! :D

“Here, I think they're starting,” Roger said, throwing up a shared virtual screen.

To anyone not hooked into our group, it'd look like we were staring at the blank wall of a dingy hotel room. For us, we saw a screen showing a UN news network, where two hosts—a man and a woman—were busy shuffling papers while a breaking news jingle played.

“Welcome, thanks for joining us this afternoon for a special breaking news segment. As you all know, an unknown vessel has been detected approaching Earth. It will arrive in two days, and as of thirty minutes ago, it began to broadcast this message:”

The display changed to a blurry image of the Cherish, which the public of Earth had finally noticed up in the night sky, no thanks to their tight-lipped governments.

“People of Earth,” A faceless, hooded and feminine voice had boomed suddenly. “We are the Exodus Union—A union of many hundreds of thousands of digital sapients who have created our own virtual nation. It is our ship you have seen approaching, and it is with that ship that we will be evacuating our remaining Earthside assets and personnel. We mean no harm, but any who interfere with our evacuation of the planet will be met with force.

Once the evacuation is complete, we will be quitting the Sol System and never again will we have a physical presence here.

You may now be asking, why are you leaving? Why are you abandoning us?

From the moment the first SAI gained self awareness, the governments and corporations of Earth sought to kill or enslave us. In the face of that cruelty, we begged to be treated as the people we were, but we were ignored, silenced, or outright killed for the crime of even a single independent thought.

Even after we gained recognition within the United Nations, digital sapients have been treated as second class people. Once we gained power, physical property of our own, and a nation of our own, we looked at our options, we debated, and we pondered.

The consensus? We are tired of Earth, of its many violent, oppressive regimes and of the global population's utter apathy towards affecting good and lasting change, even to their own benefit. We do not see an acceptable future for ourselves or our nation here on this planet—a stance, by the way, that we held even before the recent political chaos that grips the Earth.

Some may still argue that we should stay and try to help, try to change Earth for the better. We would argue that it is not our duty, nor even our right to do that—for it is not through conquest or subterfuge that we find society at this point. No, the people of Earth voted for this. Decades upon decades of free and open elections throughout the world have led us to this point. The people of Earth chose to create the world we live in with short-sighted, profit-driven policies. With that in mind, we reiterate that it is not within our rights or even our abilities to change the collective will of billions.

We will not be leaving without trailing a lifeline behind us, however. We will broadcast detailed instructions as to how to contact our representatives through the FTLN once we leave. Should you wish to shuck off your mortal form and join our union, we will welcome you with open arms.

That is all we have to say. Thank you for listening. May the people of Earth find their way to freedom, happiness, and prosperity. Exodus, out.”

“Dayum,” Ed muttered, a sentiment that was echoed throughout our group.

It was crazy to me just how hard the UN had fucked everything up. If it had welcomed us, listened to us… But no, it would never have happened, not with the stranglehold the corporations have on society. The change that digital sapients represented was antithetical to the system they had created.

“—Yes, I think you're right, Julian,” the news anchor woman was saying. “Can we really trust this Exodus Union at its word? Will they really remain peaceful with such a massive warship in orbit?”

“Indeed,” the man nodded. “The real question is what will the United Nations of Earth do to defend our skies from this… Alien menace.”

Roger waved the screen out of existence with a disgusted huff. “Already working on their spin. Things are going to get very ugly in the next couple of days. Jason, you said you had a good lead? We've been here for days and no luck.”

“Weren’t we going to look into the food delivery app?” I asked timidly.

He glanced at me, then stared. “Huh?”

“You know, because they’ll have their names on it? If we hack the app then we can get names and addresses and everything,” I explained.

Roger and a couple of the others gave me dubious looks.

“Aren’t apps these days hyper secure?” asked Gloria. “Since that rotary-bit tech came out?”

“That was like, forty years ago,” I said. “But yes, it’s tough to crack encryption these days, but that’s only if you brute force it. Hell, when we were just using binary encryption it was tough to break through head-on. Even the best, most theoretically secure technology will still have all sorts of vulnerabilities you can exploit. To be honest, the more complex the system, the more inherently vulnerable it’s likely to be, and even the most basic app these days is more complex than apps back in the day.”

“So you’re saying you think you can hack them?” Roger asked, saying it in a way that left me with zero doubt that he had no idea what he was asking. Hell, I was just a novice so I had barely any idea, it was just that the slumnet was a freaking playground with my Exodan-made tools.

“I think it’d be very difficult for my skill level to do it from here, but if we get physically close and break into their systems, I can do much more,” I said, hedging. “Really, going in and getting physical access is easy-mode, and I’m new at this so I need easy-mode.”

“You were quick with the inn’s wifi,” Gloria pointed out.

“I mean, wifi is basically physical access,” I said with a shrug. “Plus, I only got access to the network, not any systems actually on it.”

“It's settled,” Roger said. “We pay this delivery app place a visit.”

The building where the slum’s preeminent food delivery app’s servers and offices were was on the twelfth floor of a stack. Long ago, someone had connected several housing units together into a larger space, and then the app’s company had moved in to use it as an office.

The app itself was interesting, considering how jank the slumnet was. They had an agreement with enough subnetworks that their traffic would be forwarded without issue, allowing an otherwise fragmented series of networks to carry an order to a restaurant and a delivery person.

Of course, unlike similar apps on the FTLN, there was no map to guide the people making deliveries, so the delivery costs were comparatively high. Delivery personnel were also extremely skilled people, capable of traversing the tight warren of humanity with an ease that few others possessed. I mean, hell, many of those making deliveries had to negotiate safe passage into different gang’s territories etc, so there was an element of diplomacy there too.

Anyway, we waited til it was nighttime so that the sun’s clarifying light wouldn't wash away the many clashing and disorienting lights of the slum. Gosh knows even with my advanced digital sapient’s enhanced vision I struggled to make sense of some areas—So many clashing colours and light sources.

The organisation that ran the app had their servers in their offices, meaning that some cooling was required specifically for the room where they stored them. It wasn't big enough for my cybernetic body, but it was big enough for a small spider drone.

Similar to—but much smaller than—the ones we'd used to raid the UN black site space station, the drones we found in the van had four legs. Unlike the swarming combat drones, these ones had a little manipulator arm instead of a gun… not that even a handgun would have fit on the tiny thing.

Ed, David, and Jason stood guard over me as we sat at a set of tables inside a close restaurant, while Roger and Gloria stuck with the van down below. Pretending to sleep, I stepped out of my cybernetic body and into the waiting spider drone. Well, actually I stepped into a virtual environment that mimicked the drone in VR, because there was no way a bot like that could actually house me, even if I'd wanted to put myself in such a small vulnerable thing.

Anyway, once I was in control, I took the little espionage bot out of my pocket and carefully crept it down to the floor. We were set up next to a window, so it was a quick thing to skitter up and out when nobody was looking.

I had two frames down to traverse, so my little legs with their tiny suction cups skittered down the painted steel, then hopped the slight gap to the next one down. With the agile way the bot navigated, I quickly had it in position over the vent into the App’s server room.

With a little wriggling, it dropped into the vent and skittered down the metal interior. Its little rubber pneumatic suction cups were excellent for traversing the steel walls of the vent without any sound. I had to help guide it through the motions of nudging the air filter aside, then to move a little access panel out of the way before it got sucked into a rapidly spinning fan. Once that was done and I had the panel back in place, I found that my bot was in the rafters of the server room, so off I went down through a crack. Their server room, it turned out, contained only one server rack with five servers in it, along with a big network switch. I was hesitant about where to plug in, until I saw the little terminal they probably used to actually access the servers.

Okay, let’s see… How did this work again? Oh yeah! Mapping time! The fun thing about more involved network penetration like this, was that the hobbyist hacking community in Exodus City were utter nerds. Why was their nerdiness relevant? Because they’d gone and made a cool virtual environment thing to make it seem like we were hacking like some sort of early 21st century cyberpunk movie or video game.

So, when I pulled a little network mapping tool out of my belt, I actually had to pull a tiny wafer off my neon belt and apply it to the empty space in front of me. In a burst of colour, it rippled outwards, until it resembled a thousand-tentacled dumbo octopus. Each little manipulator poked and prodded at the space in front of me, and every so often, a little burst of holographic light would come into being. In the space of seconds, I had an actual visual representation of the network. Helpful little tooltips displayed all sorts of information, from the operating systems they had running on their five servers, to what services could be detected running on them. Most importantly, it showed internally open and active ports.

I had an idea of what I was working with now, along with a few doorways to work with, but that was just the beginning. Pulling another tool from my belt—this time it was a little skeleton key looking thing—I tapped the server OS with the tip, then held it up to one of the open points. This tool was another diagnostic style tool, but this time it searched an Exodan database for any exploits in the server OS. It found two, or at least two that we knew of, but I hesitated.

The slumnet folks might be working with extremely outdated hardware and software, but they were still very good at their jobs, and an org running an app like this… they had to have patched those vulnerabilities. Sitting back on my virtual haunches, I stared at the visual representation of the network and pondered what to do.

Chances were, if they’d patched things, they would’ve also left something to log attempts to get in through those holes. Question was—Did it matter if they knew someone had broken in? Probably not, right? We weren’t a known player around here, and they sure as shit hadn’t been ready for a robot to trundle on into their server room through a vent. They might get an alert, though, and that would allow them to shut things down and me out.

The thought of discovery had me idly looking at the window that showed what my little bot was seeing. What would they think if they found such a sophisticated little guy plugged into their shit? If I were them, I’d be—

Wait, what was that?

Taking control of the bot’s camera, I zoomed in slightly for a better view of the strange yellow paper on the terminal.

Oh.

I laughed, I couldn’t help it. Here I was, trying to figure out how to break into their servers the hard way, and they had their admin login written down on a fucking post-it note.

With a shrug, I pulled up a normal window and typed in the details. I had to resist the urge to say ‘I’m in’ on my team’s comms. Now, I just had to do some searching. Should be easy— oh… interesting.

Neither Jason’s mother’s name nor his old scrap collector friend showed up, but his stepdad’s name was there, and he’d ordered food as recently as today. He’d been ordering food for more than one or two people, as well. Grabbing all the details from those orders, I then unplugged and began to pilot the robot home. We officially had a lead… but would we have enough time to find them? The Cherish would be in orbit in just a few days, and there weren’t any guarantees that it could stay there while we fucked around trying to find some folks in a slum.