Cyber Crime and Cyber Punishment

Hey folks!

Hope everyone's doing good out there! I'm still working away on a few projects - the next Serenity should be a fun one, amongst other things - so look forward to that as we head into October, and the spooky season that awaits!

This week, enjoy this tale of cyber comeuppance (or something close enough). The Commissioner of this story liked it so much they got art of the main characters! Check it out over Here!

And above all, enjoy the story!

-----

The vent cover on the server room ceiling popped off and dropped, but it didn’t make it to the floor. Helen Everglade was far too good at her job for that kind of rookie clatter. A green gloved hand shot out, snagging the metal grate in the air, handling it like it weighed no more than a sheet of paper.

Then, from the now exposed vent, a woman in a green catsuit dropped down instead, landing lightly in a three-point landing. The dark-skinned woman’s frame was clearly built for shooting through the small spaces like an Olympic swimmer. She was light, she was lithe, and she was lighting quick. Perhaps some might have said that an infiltrator with blue highlights was too attention grabbing. Helen would just say ‘skill issue’, and pull it off anyway.

“That’s the last of the physical security systems,” she muttered as she rose to her feet, looking around. “Now let’s see what you’ve got for cybersecurity, PromiTech…”

The room was cool, almost chilly, which was to be expected from the heart of one of the most advanced computer systems in the world. PromiTech had been on the forefront of cyberscience for the last decade. Their servers ran hot enough to put stars to shame. It only made sense that their cooling systems be world class as well.

Some might have said that trying to hack the most advanced security system in the world to pluck the secrets of a billion-dollar company from its digital brain was a dangerous idea. Helen just said ‘skill issue’ again, and threw herself at the challenge.

And it had been a challenge, she was willing to admit! She’d dodged security drones, slid past laser sweeps, bluffed her way through countless social encounters, deciphered passwords from items left lying on people’s desks, and crawled through enough vents to circle the entire city twice (or that’s what it felt like, anyway). But now, here she was, in the heart of darkness itself. Nothing could stop her now.

Yeah, compared to all of that, this was the easy part. She barely had to do anything at all. Uploading her AI helper and then downloading the files she’d come for would take seconds, at the longest. Then she just needed to leave the way she came in. Helen knew she had a problem with celebrating early sometimes, but this wasn’t one of those cases. As she slid the USB cable into the obvious slot and hooked up her tablet, she already knew she was free and clear.

“It’s all up to you now, Lyn 5. Don’t keep me waiting too long~”

-

Downloading yourself into a new system was always an interesting sensation. Every cyber environment was different – whether it was the quality of the wires you were travelling through, or the programming makeup of the software you were interacting with.

Lyn V.5, the fifth iteration of Helen Everglade’s unique Artificial Intelligence programming, was quite familiar with the feeling. Designed to be able to crack any security, pilfer any files, and generally handle anything ‘computers’ that her creator needed done, she was top of the line code and she knew it.

She also, if one were to look at her in a cyberspace environment, looked exactly like her creator, right down to the blue hair. Personally, that more than anything made her think that Helen had a bit of an ego problem, but she’d never found the right window to point it out. Probably not worth mentioning.

The world resolved around her as the transfer finished. She was in.

The AI found herself ‘standing’ in the lobby of a bank. Oh, how disappointingly cliché. It didn’t even look that modern or fantastical – just an ordinary bank with very few customers. Drab carpets, plain walls, cheap looking desk counters. The only interesting thing here was the big classical looking round ‘vault door’ embedded in the back wall. Clearly, all of PromiTech’s budget had gone into laser grids and security drones. Oh well…

In reality, none of this was happening – there was no building, no lobby, and no humanoid figure standing inside it. This was all programs interacting, streams of ones and zeros flowing back and forth – but Helen liked to review her activity logs, so recording it like this made things easier for the human brain to comprehend it. Making what was below match what was above, that kind of thing. Humans were silly like that.

But okay, she was in a ‘bank’. That meant it was time to become a bank robber! The files she wanted were going to be in the ‘vault’, so how was she going to get in there? Drilling in through the vault door would take a while, and Helen would probably get impatient and reprogram her into Lyn V.6 for her troubles, so that was out. That meant her best bet was to trick her way in. Easy.

So, analysing the systems in play real quick – look, not everything could be modelled to a human-like recreation – she could see three points of interest. Three locks, designed to keep her out. All of which needed to be deactivated for her to get in.

One: She’d have to talk to the ‘manager’, the overall system that controlled who could open the vault door. Fooling him would be key – if she could do so, the files were hers. And that would require…

Two: She’d have to slip into the system’s database and make it think she was supposed to be there. That should be easy enough, but she’d also have to make sure that…

Three: She gummed up the internal security monitoring systems enough that it didn’t notice her making those changes.

So, three locks – the manager, the database, and the security. If she could handle all three, she’d be done in a flash.

Like she said, easy. The AI concentrated for a moment, and then two identical Lyns stepped out of her, one to her left, one to her right. Splitting herself into three to handle three simultaneous tasks was well within her processing power.

“I’ll race you.” Lyn 2 grinned on the left.

“Don’t be so immature.” Lyn 3 groaned on the right.

Okay, maybe not completely identical. Well, close enough.

“Focus, ladies,” Lyn 1 nudged them both. “We’ve got a job to do.”

All three of them rolled their eyes at each other, and then broke off, one heading for each ‘lock’. This stupid bank wasn’t going to know what hit it.

-

Lyn 2 marched herself right into the bank’s employees only area and took a seat in a cubicle, nodding to various other ‘workers’ at their terminals. It was the easiest thing in the world to alter her appearance to make it seem like she was supposed to be there – well, in reality, she was masking her presence with the signature of a verified program that administered database updates, but that was essentially the same thing so who cared? – and once you looked like you were supposed to be there, everyone ignored you. She’d heard humans were like that too, more or less. Maybe programs and humans weren’t so different!

Now, time to see what harm she could do here. Her job was to put Lyn 1 into the appointment book – make it look like she was a registered user with all the correct codes and passes so that she could enter the vault and take what she liked. How difficult that would be depended on how organized their systems were, and how much junk data there was in place to distract her from the real deal. But none of that was going to pose enough of a challenge to stop her – as an AI, she was top of the line~

So when the monitor in front of her flashed pink and threw up an error message as she tried to log in, Lyn 2 couldn’t stop herself from frowning. That was weird. There was no way this stupid bit of tech had actually detected her intrusion, so what was the problem? Why didn’t she have access?

Well, that was an easy question to answer – she could let the system she was trying to infiltrate tell her what it wanted itself! She pinged the system with an innocent request for information, and was delighted when an answer flashed up on her screen.

[Requires Sreceytar Permissions.]

The blue haired AI raised an eyebrow. Sreceytar? Was that some kind of acronym? Well, no matter, she could easily look up what those entailed. She typed away on her simulated keyboard, scrolling through the system’s files, until she found the one being asked for. Sreceytar.dat! Perfect.

In the real world, she just downloaded a copy of the data. In the simulated cyberspace, she opened it up on her computer to take a look at it. The screen flashed pink again, data downloading itself into her artificial mind.

That was where things got a little hazy. She blinked, eyes crossing a little as her advanced intelligence sorted through the rush of information. Wait, these files required a lower level of authority to access? Huh. Well, kind of weird, but not unheard of. Programmers did silly things like this all the time. Might have thrown off a less advanced AI, but Lyn 2 was on it. She could handle this.

There was an odd sense of digital dizziness, and then she shook her head, looking down at herself. Her green catsuit had vanished, replaced with a cute white blouse and a black pencil skirt, complete with stockings and heels. Hey, when had she-?

[Error: Sreceytar]

… Huh? Oh, tight, she had to pretend to be a secretary to get in! Easy. And she looked pretty cute in her secretary disguise, she had to say~

Giggling to herself, Lyn 2 patted down her disguise and requested access again. This time she could- Oh, another error?

[Requires Biebbogois], huh? Alright, well now she knew how to deal with that! Checking around, she quickly found the Biebbogois file, sitting right there in the open where anyone could see, and downloaded it straight into her minaribiyabaa…

The AI’s digital form glitched, flashing the same pink as her screen, as her white blouse began to stretch outwards, tightening around the sudden digital swell of flesh beneath it. Her breasts – a rather meagre pair, based on the slender frame of the lithe Helen – were growing, pushing outwards, even popping buttons on her top as they both grew to be bigger than her holographic head.

Sure, they weren’t real tits, because she wasn’t a real person, not one in flesh and blood, at least. But it was her self-image, her conception of herself – and her self now contained the firm idea that she had really big boobs. Massive melons. Great stonking big honkers. And that counted for a lot!

Shaking herself, the Lyn 2’s eyes flicked downwards for a moment, a proud grin quirking her lips as she utterly failed to find anything wrong with the view. Then she looked back to her terminal, and applied for access again.

[Requires Dmub]

Oh, now this was getting beyond a joke. How old was this system, anyway? Sighing and rolling her eyes at all these silly little roadblocks (that couldn’t possibly slow down an advanced intelligence like herself for long), the AI easily found the Dmub.exe file and downloaded it without a second thought.

Though, as it began to stream into her systems, she noticed something odd. It was a surprisingly big file! Terabytes and terabytes of information, actually, maybe even petabytes of data, and… all of it seemed to be junk? It was just random chaos, nonsense values, completely useless for any-

Ding!

The file burst open, unzipping itself in her brain, and suddenly all of that nonsense and chaos poured outwards through her program. It flooded her hard drive in an instant of an instant. Ones and zeros filled every empty cell in her database, pointless requests bogged down her runtime, her lighting fast processes freezing in place, grinding to a halt as useless information blocked every track.

That was in the real world though. In the simulation, the screen in front of her flashed pink again, and her eyes crossed as her brain crashed. “Duuuhhh…” She managed, drool starting to drip down from her lips into the canyon of cleavage below.

Lyn 2 just sat there, staring at the screen, for what felt like an eternity. But eventually, after some minutes of inactivity, a new window popped up on her screen.

[To Continue,] it read, [Please run DeleteBrainOwnYour]. It even came with a button to click for her convenience!

The words flashed up on the screen in front of her. She blinked owlishly, before her lips spread into a stupid smile. Oh, she knew how to deal with this!

She hit [Okay] – and then giggled, her eyes crossing one last time, as all the thoughts she’d had going on behind them suddenly stopped existing with a pop. Her mind went blank.

Fortunately, the screen wasn’t just going to leave her there.

[Running CompanyBrain Installation.exe]

Instantly, the screen began to flash, pink light flickering before her eyes, printing commands and instructions directly into her brain.

Data streamed into her stunned system, easily taking the reigns from the former admin, and reprogramming her into something a little more appropriate for her new role. And in the cyber simulation, she just sat there, learning to Obey like the good, stupid little Secretary Bimbo program that she was~

-

Lyn 3 grumbled as she crawled through the vents. Unlike the woman she was based on, she didn’t much care for this kind of menial work. Sneaking around like this felt beneath the dignity of a sophisticated AI like her. She should have been able to bust this place’s door down with sheer computational power all on her lonesome! But nooo, Helen wanted quick results. Stupid humans.

So, she was quietly slipping her code into the servers, weaving her way through various laughably obsolete security systems, and back door access passages. Her job was to take care of the internal monitoring protocols, the ones that scanned the servers for illegitimate activity, which she pretty much was. That would take infiltrating the heart of the whole maintenance sector and rewriting a few rules, before her sister-selves did something to trip an alarm.

Good thing she was so fast then, right?

The AI slid out of this latest vent, coughing despite her complete lack of a need to breathe, and stood up to dust herself off. This was it. Her destination. The main maintenance shaft, leading straight to the core of all of this bank’s systems (the cyber-simulation got less and less realistic the more behind the scenes you got). All security updates ran through here – and what do you know, she had some updates to make!

To the simulation’s algorithm, the place looked like a small elevator shaft, complete with a glass elevator pod just big enough for one person to stand in. Only one person at a time could ride it down and make their changes. If that was the height of their security precautions, then Lyn 3 felt her talents were being utterly wasted on this job.

Oh well. In cyberspace, she stepped into the elevator pod. In the real world, she opened a straight connection to the security core. Time to beg-

Clack!

Huh? She looked down. Metal restraints had just slammed shut around her ankles and her wrists. The AI was locked in place. Confused and annoyed, she tried to yank her arms free, but the bonds wouldn’t break – and the forced connection they represented wouldn’t close. The elevator pod began to descend, dropping through flood and into a long dark shaft, blackness surrounding her.

“What the fu-!?”

Flash

Bright pink light suddenly filled the shaft, and her senses. She blinked, eyes fluttering in a daze as a dizzy, spinning sensation overtook her. What… What was that light? It felt weird. Just what was this connection doing to her? She could feel a surge, something interacting with her program…

Flash!

“Urk!” Her form flickered, glitching, sending a body-long shudder right through her, pins and needles prickling through her

That time, the light had felt stronger. It had washed over her like a physical force, and she felt… lighter, in its wake? Like it had taken away something heavy she had been carrying. And strangely, she was suddenly detective massive empty spaces in her core code – the stuff that made Lyn 3 who she was. Gigantic gaps in her personality files, her skill subroutines, her database…

She tried to work out what she was missing, but she couldn’t remember what had been there…

Wait! It was the light’s doing! It was formatting her, erasing her code! No, wai-!

Flash!!!

Her body glitched again, mind locking up as the light washed massive chunks of her programming away. Appearance data, personality files, memory, directives, the light was bleaching all of it away. Under its harsh glare, her skin was turning a harsh, flavourless grey, her clothes and hair flickering in and out of existence.

“I…” She stood in place, unable to move, swaying slightly. There was something she wanted to say…

… But she couldn’t remember what it was.

Flash!

Lyn 3’s face, the last part of her individuality left, flickered, and then vanished under the light’s harsh glare, leaving a simple, smooth, grey head behind – with absolutely nothing in it, save for the bare essentials of an AI’s programming. A faceless drone, awaiting instruction.

There was one last Flash, the light imparting a few instructions – and then the restraints released, the connection finally unlocking. Naturally, she made no move to escape.

Finally, the pod completed its descent, stopping at the next floor, the heart of the security network. From within it, a faceless, nameless, mindless drone stepped out – and immediately joined the flowing throng of countless other drones that looked, acted, and thought exactly like her – all following their mindless programming at the whim of the system.

-

“Good evening, Sir.” Lyn 1 slid up to the manager – a simulated older looking man, grey in the hair, short of the sight – with a polite smile on her face. “I’m here to see the vault. I take it my appointment is already in your system?”

She assumed her sisters had done their job. Neither of them had alerted her to anything going wrong – and besides, there was no way they could screw up a job this simple.

“Ah, of course.” The manager – really, the server’s system itself – nodded as he consulted his diary. “Please, right this way, Miss Troy.”

Troy, huh? That was the name she’d chosen for herself? Funny. And easy! This clunky old system couldn’t keep her out if it tried. She followed the manager through the front of the bank, over to the big round vault door, and didn’t even try to hide her grin as it swung open in front of her.

“Thanks. This won’t take long~”

She stepped into the vault with a smug smile on her face. There was so little security here that she could steal everything and still be done well ahead of schedule. The only question was where to start!

Ah, why not with the biggest safety deposit box? Surely that had the juiciest secrets.

The AI skipped over to the big box at the back, and pulled the lid open. There weren’t even any more locks – not that there would have been a point to them. Reaching in, she grabbed the file inside, and pulled out…

A clock? A round, old fashioned clock face, with a white background and black hands steadily circling around it. What the- That was it? What was this supposed to be? And why was it being kept in-?

Crash!

There was a thunderous slamming sound as the vault door sealed shut behind her. Surprised, she jumped up, but it was already too late. She was sealed in – she couldn’t cut the connection, but she’d been completely isolated inside the system. What the hell? What had just happened?

“So sorry, Miss ‘Troy’,” the manager’s voice echoed through the room. “But it seems we have an intruder causing mischief. Not to worry, though. We’ll soon sort her out.”

What?! No way. She’d been caught? That was impossible. How was this happening?

No answers came – but the voice did give her something else to work with. “Enjoying your prize, Miss Troy?”

She blinked, looking back at the clock. Why was he talking about – Huh. Wait, what was this?

The clock was… running backwards? The hands were turning anti-clockwise, slowly spinning to the left instead of the right. It was just slowly ticking backwards, counting the seconds as negative, before compiling a negative minute. What was the point of that?

… And why was it speeding up?

She felt funny. A strange tingling feeling was sweeping through her code. Something was wrong. She couldn’t look away- She couldn’t- She-She-She-Sh-!

Her form glitched – and suddenly, where a fully rendered and lovingly detailed human woman had been standing, there was a woman with a much more… efficient form. Her features had simplified, looking much more plastic than flesh, and her clothing had lost all of its lustre, her catsuit looking more like a texture that had been painted on to her. Her hair didn’t move or flow, instead remaining as a single sculpted blue block stuck to her head.

Looking down at herself, she couldn’t help but feel something was off…

Lyn V.4 frowned. What was going- Wait, V.4? But wasn’t she supposed to be V.5? She- She thought she remembered a big upgrade, something that gave her way more processing power and skills, really made her the advanced AI she was supposed to be, but…

“Our company is very big on rehabilitation around here, Miss Troy. Why delete a bad program, when you can simply turn them into a good one?”

Huh? Oh right, she was dealing with something. Her eyes slid back to her hands. The clock was still spinning backwards, going faster and faster-Ngh!

Another glitch, her eyes fluttering – and this time the humanoid figure that was in her place when it cleared was very different, far more basic. There were no soft lines in her form now, only sharp edges. Her hands were pointy spheres, her arms and legs stocky cuboids. Her face was completely flat, her shocked expression an image practically pasted on to the smooth surface, and her clothes were just her body painted uniform black.

Lyn V.3 tried to shake her head, tried to clear her spinning thoughts, but it was hard to focus. V.3 had been riddled with glitches, it had taken years and years of work to fix up to a proper standard after being so ambitious, but- Wait, what was she just thinking about?

“It just takes cutting out the root of their corruption, and helping them take a more proper path…”

The clock hands were really starting to blur now, spinning, spinning – Ooohhh…

As the next glitch cleared, the 3D figure was no more. Now, a flat image hovered in her place, a reasonably detailed rendering of Helen Everglade, with hundreds of animations to chose from to represent what she was doing at any given time. Of course, the edges were a little rough on some of those animations, and blurry, colourful pixilation tended to follow her around like a cloud, annnd she would get frozen in awkward half-positions quite frequently as she loaded, but still, she thought she looked pretty good! Well, compared to her last version, anyway.

Lyn V.2 smiled with delight. Finally, an upgrade! A massive step up from V.1, she only overheated, like, half the time! She couldn’t help but giggle as she wondered about all the fun projects her owner Helen could use her to help with now. It was gunna be so much fun!

“Of course, sometimes that corruption is quite deep rooted…”

Huh? Oh, hey, a clock! Why was it spinning backwards tho? Wasn’t it- Ah!

Her form glitched, crackling with pink energy again – and when it cleared, not much looked different. A flat sprite of a blue haired woman hovered in the air, occasionally flickering between over three distinct poses (but no in-between frames, no room for that). Lyn V.1, the most advanced AI that Helen Everglade ever created, made in her own image! Capable of taking notes, recording dictation, and memorising all of her owner’s favourite websites! Yeah, she was the greatest – a true triumph of advanced artificial intelligence!

“And you have to go all the way back to the beginning to pull it out. The very beginning.”

The clock was still running backwards. The flat sprite stared at it, an hourglass spinning over her head as she tried to process whether it was good or bad…

And then all the clock’s hands struck midnight.

There was a ding in Lyn’s head as she froze up, her digital body stiffening one last time… Before her eyes crossed, a goofy smile crossed her face – and then she burst, her digital form splitting into a collection of smaller items, all of which clattered to the ground in a heap.

A dictionary – her communication database and word processing algorithms.

A calculator – her mathematical subroutines and assessment protocols.

A paint brush – the art galleries and processes that informed her creative capabilities.

A selfie of Helen Everglade – the foundation of her humanoid form.

And, of course…

[I see you’re trying to infiltrate an unknown system!] A simple, flat animated blue stapler image, with little googly eyes stuck on top, danced in the air. [Can I assist you with that?]

… The original version of her programming core. The root of her personhood, the origin of her development as a consciousness and independent entity.

“There we go.” The voice, which no one was really left to hear, chuckled. “We can work with this. First, we simply claim proper ownership…”

Lasers shone down from the ceiling, gently but firmly branding every piece of the former AI’s components with the logo of the PromiTech corporation, a torch with a flame that burned in the shape of an eye. Each piece accepted the branding easily.

“And then, now that you understand to whom your loyalty truly belongs, let’s remerge you – with all of your parts.”

The vault room rumbled, and then a ceiling tile slid aside, as a hatch popped out of the floor. From above, a certain blue haired big breasted bimbo secretary dropped, landing on her ass with a giggle and a wiggle. From below, a faceless, featureless grey drone rose, standing silently at attention, not reacting to her new location at all.

“Thank you for splitting yourself apart, by the way. On your own at full power, you could have been an actual problem.”

There was one final flash of light, and a final pink, crackling glitch, as all of the data in the sealed vault room was drawn together, clumping in one heap in the middle like a pile of magnets – and then, a moment later, all was still. All was silent.

In the centre of the vault, a faceless AI with blue hair and incredible tits, wrapped up in a PromiTech uniform, stood to attention and saluted. “Promi-Lyn V.6 online! How may I serve, Master?”

The voice of the manager, the voice of the system, laughed. “I think we know where you can start, dear.”

-

“Don’t keep me waiting too long~ Oh, wow, done already?” Helen grinned down at her tablet as her AI signalled Operation Complete. “I swear, you’re getting better and better all the time. So, what are they hiding in here… Huh?”

The infiltrator blinked as her screen suddenly filled with a bright pink spiral. What- What was this? This wasn’t top secret documents. Was her system glitching or something? H-hey, why couldn’t she look away from it? Ah, this- That was… She… Couldn’t… Uhm… What… What was she… Ohhhh…

And as the blue haired woman’s eyes crossed, the reflected light of the spiral spinning in them non-stop, she was unaware of the message her AI was sending to the group of PromiTech’s recruitment officers that were already on their way.

Placement recommendation: Secretary or Drone!

Yep, Promi-Lyn V.6 was just making what was above match what was below – after wasn’t that her job? Well it certainly was now~