That didn’t mean they didn’t have blind spots.
Flynn’s face smiled back from the mirror as his stubby fingers and blunted nails managed to pry open the hinged cover on the restraint collar’s control panel. There was little to see underneath, just a little socket to receive an optical cable—
The fact was, for all the security people Sheldon had camped here, no one on Salmagundi really understood security. Because of the culture they developed, one that bred a conformist personality into nearly every citizen, they had all but forgotten that people like Tetsami had ever existed. Crime, such as it was, tended to be petty and personal. When these people went to the Hall of Minds, they didn’t choose singletons like Tetsami to receive. They picked people who had status in living memory, or those who held the memories of a dozen others whose skills spelled their own advancement.
Tetsami, however, had a skill set that was largely forgotten about, and as such, inadequately protected against.
Behind the ceiling panel were several cables, one leading to the hidden camera that watched the interior of the barracks itself. Once she made sure that the bathroom door was locked, she reached up and grabbed the data cable. She pulled one end out of the camera socket, disconnecting it.
Flynn didn’t vocalize anything, but she felt his apprehension.
She reached into the recess and pulled the cable free from another camera, pulling two three-meter lengths of optical cable into the bathroom. She knew Flynn’s worry. Both cameras go dead, and he had the amateur worry that security would fall on them at that very moment.
Tetsami knew well, however, human nature being what it was, the drone manning the camera feed would make the easy assumption that it was a technical fault, which it sort of was.
The security spud would waste a few minutes on technical diagnostics trying to troubleshoot the problem before calling the live guards to check things out. If they were in luck, there wasn’t any alarm on the feed—this wasn’t a prison after all—and the spud on duty was involved in something less boring—like a game of solitaire or watching the mining lasers—and wouldn’t even clue into the missing feed for awhile.
Even though she had kept her skills on ice for years, she was sure she wouldn’t need more than a minute or two. Especially since, unlike at her old stomping ground, the connections for wide-band optical data feeds on this planet were somewhat standard.
One cable she jacked into the port on the restraint collar. The other one she set into the small concave bio- interface set in Flynn’s neck. The connection found the magnetic socket just under the skin and set itself with a click that resonated in Flynn’s jaw. She could sense his growing panic as she connected. Bad memories, she thought. But she couldn’t spare the time for reassurances now; he was going to have to hang on for the ride.
The data line she connected to wasn’t designed for a bio-interface, so it took several interminable seconds to sift through the sensory garbage that flooded her brain, random flashes of color, icy pins and needles racing across skin, white noise, a floral chemical smell that combined with the taste of rotten bananas. All sense of her body was gone, except for the vague feeling of Flynn’s body beginning to hyperventilate. The panicked gasps for air were far away and slow, her time sense had begun to telescope seconds into minutes.
Most people on Salmagundi, even those trained to use a biojack for something other than ancestor worship, would have probably drowned in the chaos of sensation, lost without a prefab software shell to guide them.
Not her.
Tetsami programmed a custom shell on the fly. Not as quickly as she could have in her prime, but Flynn’s brain still had some of the Tetsami genes, and that gave her something of the edge she used to have. In moments she had wrapped her senses in a simple blue shell that gave everything but her eyes and the kinesthetic/tactile impulses from her hands back to the nonvirtual world.
She heard and felt Flynn’s body breathing real time, and felt the sweat on his skin. Fortunately, he seemed to be calming now that the world had ordered itself around her.
There was security on the data line, but only on the human-interface level. The pipe for the video was wide open and unencrypted, and let her in without even asking for a handshake. In seconds, she was in the heart of the security network, pulling up every I/O signal she could identify.
Instantly, she pulled up visuals on every camera linked up to the security system, surrounding her point of view with visual feedback from every camera tied to the security net.
In the small arena of Sheldon’s temporary camp, she was briefly omniscient, surrounded by views of every building, every vehicle, down to the security guard sitting in a shack watching his holo monitors. It was either Frank or Tony—she had never bothered to keep those guys straight. Frank/Tony was just now noticing the loss of two video feeds from Flynn’s barracks.
