second level.
New mission: Total domination. Description: You need to take control of the storage, level by level (number of levels unknown). Own the building to receive a handsome reward.
***
Note!
Note that there are intelligent monsters in the lower levels
of the storage.
Note that a member of the 3R32-221 Earth release team is somewhere in the storage.
***
Analyzing player’s recent activity...
New mission: Internal network access. Description: Get to the control room for the lower levels and gain access to the internal network used by the 3R32-221 release team. Minimum total attribute and skill levels required to complete the mission: 710 (your current total: 700).
Note!
The game owner bestowed a special status on hexagon
118: Chosen.
The hexagon general was promoted to the top of the
ranking.
All limitations placed on the presence of non-natural players have been removed.
***
All natural players receive a one-time bonus:
Level +50 (712).
Coins + 712000000 (l million per level).
***
As a location owner, note that non-natural players can now spent up to 12 out of every 24 hours in your location. That limitation does not apply to the changed.
Surprisingly enough, I took the new information in stride. I didn’t even have the urge to call Gardine and warn him that guests were going to
be arriving soon. Before doing anything else, I retraced my steps out of the control room and replaced the block I’d taken out of the external wall, using Valkyrie's freeze rounds to hold it in place. The aliens didn’t know where I was. And I wanted it to stay that way.
So, I'm on the second level? Presumably, the first level was above me, though I had no idea how many were below my feet. And there were also monsters down there, not to mention the unpleasant creature I definitely wanted to have words with. So be it! I was going to get to the network and see what the bastards had done with Squirrel. And then, III have it out with them.
There was no sense wasting any more time. There were stairs to be
found.
Chapter 8
THE 710 MINIMUM requirement for the mission meant the storage’s protection was up to 700 at least. And I could have sat in front of the terminal for a bit longer than a day before it would give in and open its treasures to me, so I assumed I’d only have half an hour. An how' at the most. In other words, I had to be prepared before I headed down to the lower levels.
And how could I prepare?
There was only one way: I needed to bury endless quantities of needles in myself yet again.
Obviously, I didn’t go barging my way down the stairs. Quite the contrary — as soon as I found them, I turned around and ran off as though I’d seen a plasma grenade. Over the previous month, I’d begun to understand what set humans apart from the other players in the game, and that was our overwhelming hunger for profit. Nothing was ever enough, which was why we always grabbed everything we could get our hands on. Whatever could be sold was sold, otherwise we were in for a nervous breakdown. To be fair, the Alturians, who dragged everything off to their lairs, were something like us. But they were just kleptomaniacs; we
were in it for the coins. All the coins!
I headed back to the terminal and got to work really studying it in depth, selling off everything I could, including the interior walls, doors, and even furniture. There weren't many devices. Even fewer of them were available to me. And sadly, the whole security system, all the mines, lasers, and pressure/motion/air sensors, even the gas analyzers, weren’t part of the second level. When I sold the walls, the system collapsed to the floor, a useless pile of metal. It didn't work, but I couldn’t do anything with it, either. That was confirmed the moment I placed a hand on a mine.
You don’t have access to the level 2 security system.
I looked around sadly. The second level had turned into an open plan floorspace with at least half a billion coins’ worth of equipment littering the floor. But there was nothing I could do. On the other hand, I didn’t make out so badly as it was. Everything I could sell netted me around 350 million, which coupled with the owner’s bonus to have me ready for my next big upgrade. Dropping 900 million coins, I had three hours before the changes took effect. Hopefully, there won’t be anything too serious on the level above me. Unwilling to waste time, I was going to head right up.
Hacking +30 (190).
Perception +30 (190).
There were 280 million coins left in my account, though I decided
to leave them there in case I ended up needing to bump my hacking skills up another level or two. Of course, I had to doubt anyone in the game had pushed their hacking protection up past level 190, but it was still better to be prepared just in case.
One thing I wasn't prepared for was that Fang couldn't cut through the ceiling. And that seemed strange — my adaptive vision told me it was made out of the game’s nanoparticles, though I still couldn’t open a hole that would let me climb up. Neither Fang nor the level eight vibroknife I bought to test out worked. Returning the useless piece of trash to the game, I headed over to the stairs. I guess, I’m going to have to just do it the straightforward way.
Admittedly, the path I chose wasn't exactly straightforward. Once I got up to the first level, I cut through two walls to get to the center. The level was much smaller than the first one I’d found myself on, and so I was only given twenty minutes to handle the protection. Presumably, III have forty minutes for the third level. That was cheery news.
You’re trying to hack the defenses of remote work terminal UT-1251.
Sum total of your skill levels: 700.
Sum total ofUT-i25i’s defenses: 630.
Probability of successful hack: 10%.
That time, it was a piece of cake. Five attempts later, the system threw up its hands, and I had all the sensors deleted from the database not long after that. It took me just five minutes to gain control of the first level, in fact. After a repeat of my marauding ways, I was 150 million coins richer even as I stared sadly at the half a million coins lying on the floor in the form of explosives.
The first two levels had been suspiciously easy. Somehow, I couldn't imagine the general and its spawn creating a level 160+ security system that let people just cut right through the walls. Things were presumably going to be getting more challenging.
But I did hate when my predictions came true. As soon as I got down to the third level, the game threw me a fun little curveball:
Get to the control room for the storage’s third level.
Note! The walls in the third level are load-bearing, so they cannot be destroyed. You do not have a time restriction.
The game had apparently been tracking my moves. Just in case, I tried to stick Fang into the wall, though the blade just ricocheted off without leaving so much as a scratch. And when I glanced sadly down the hallway, I noticed the laser traps, mines, and other devices there to keep out especially nosey players like me.
To be honest, I didn’t have any desire to pick my way down the hallway. A realistic evaluation of my abilities didn’t include an aptitude for that kind of ninja work. Even though I was an infiltrator, without really digging into my class, that was more a title than a description.
Well then, what? Throw in the towel?
I didn't particularly like that option. Sitting down right next to the entrance to the third level, I gazed off along the hallway and tried to think.
Okay, what do I have? There was the multi-level storage packed with traps. Some players had access, the list of last names in the white list being proof of that. The traps, therefore, would ignore them. Well..if they ignore everyone in the white list... That was something.
Hm...
Hypothesizing that I had access to a particular level, I didn't im
agine there would be some kind of code or key I’d have to enter or show whenever I wanted to visit that level. That might have been fine for small fry, but the big fish walking around like the conquerors of the galaxy certainly wouldn’t have tolerated that kind of thing. And in that case, there had to be some kind of recognition system that scanned players the moment they appeared within range of the traps, which would then decide whether they were going to trigger or not.
My palms were slick from the nerves. From what I could tell, my best chance was to gain control of how players were scanned, somehow misrepresenting the data to fool the system into thinking I was a friendly. That way, I wouldn’t have to see what kind of an acrobat I wasn’t.
Heading back up to the second level, I plopped down in front of the terminal. There were thirty players in the white list I’d added myself to. Several of them, of course, were painfully familiar: Two, Three, Osier, Elhar, and (a grin flashed across my face) Villian. My old friend, the head of the erstwhile mercenary group Tsarter, also had access to the second level.
I pulled up the store. There was one item I thought of to check out, and my intuition was right on the money. Fartira! Three of its expansions kept you hidden at the location, hexagon, and game-wide level, though they weren’t the only three. There were others I’d ignored as not really anything I needed back then.
Fartira. Mimicry (expansion). Description: Hides your identity by replacing it with another player's, including their appearance. Duration: 2Q minutes. To use another player’s appearance, you need to know them personally (or have desfroyed them, in which case you can only use their identity for a month after their death). Players with perception higher than your mimicry will be able to see your true appearance. Requirements: Mimicry (100), camouflage (100), consciousness block (100), closure (100), introversion (100). Cost: 10000000000 coins.
Suddenly, I had a new most expensive piece of equipment. The system printed it out, and I set it on my hip, basing it on Fartira.
Mimicry +160 (160).
I ended up having to wait the three hours for the new attribute. Happily, mimicry was primary for infiltrators, which meant the update cost a paltry 36.5 million. As soon as the job was done, I activated Fartira and checked out the new expansion. Let’s see what this is all about.
Integrating...
Generating list of players available for mimicry.
A fairly impressive list of all the players I’d been luck}7 enough to meet in the game popped up in front of me. And next to each name were a few numerical values. The first was the percent difference between the player as they were the last time I’d seen them and the way they were in that moment; the second was the degree to which I knew them in percentages; the third was the total mimicry percentage. I added eliminated as another column to make things easier and sorted them by mimicry percentage from highest to lowest.
At the top of the list, unsurprisingly, was Grust. There was a 93% chance his own mother wouldn’t have been able to tell us apart. The only problem there was that I didn’t have any reason to mimic him — he didn’t have access, either. Filtering the list by dead and alive, I stopped short. Villian was right there, only the game gave me a value of just 33%. I didn’t actually know that green bastard at all... And here I’d thought I’d really gotten to know it.
I ended up having to dive into the description of the skill to see
what exactly the percentage gave me. And I didn’t like what I found.
From what I read, players with high-level perception could see my true appearance without biting on the trickery I was trying to pull. A higher mimicry level made it harder on them. If it wras higher than their perception, they wouldn’t have any reason to guess they wTere actually talking to me. The problem there was that the percentage represented how much of my overall mimicry7 level counted — to take Villian as an example, my level 160 mimicry wrould have effectively been just level 53. Somehow, I had to doubt the system had perception that low.
That was a major hurdle. I had no idea w7hat to do about it, though I could tell I needed to rule out Villian. Wlxat about someone else? Pulling up the list of players with access once again, I started going down it.
Osier: 56%. Elhar: 32%. Three: 11%. Two: 83%.
I froze, staring in surprise at that last line. The first column gave me 0%, which meant Two hadn’t changed at all since the last time we’d met, and my scanning had come up big. I didn’t know the robot’s particulars quite as well, the value there dropping to 66%, but even that was enough for me.
Okay, let’s do the math. Taking 83% of 160 gave me an effective mimicry level of 132. What perception level does the system here have? Its hacking protection was fairly high, all the way up at level 160, and I definitely didn’t want to lean entirely on my good luck. The aliens needed something from the storage, so the protection was presumably as high as it could go. And since all its other attributes were at level 160, its perception had to be, as well.
Going back to the 83% value, I calculated that I needed my mimicry pushed to level 193 to make sure my effective number was above 160. It wasn't going to be far above 160, but it was going to be enough for me to no longer be Mark. Damn it, Im getting tired of these prices...
Mimicry +33 (193)-
I really had gotten lucky with mimicry being a primary attribute. Three hundred million coins disappeared like they were nothing, and I sat down on the floor, pulling up the list of top players in the location as I waited for the update. Just as I’d assumed, there were already hunters showing up. Gardine was no longer in the land of the living. I hadn’t warned him, after all. Why did I resurrect him? All I’d done was waste a unit of noa. Whatever, III avenge him. Ill avenge him, Squirrel, and all the T'est of humankind.
Verifying player LRO-443-2.
System perception: 160... Mark Derwin’s mimicry: 160.19.
Verification successful, you were recognized as player
LRO-443-2.
Access to storage level 3 granted.
Current role: privileged guest.
I was inspired. It was one of those situations where I was right, and all I wanted to do was boast about how right I was, only there was nobody to listen. Also, it wouldn’t have mattered. Under the watchful glare of the lasers, sensors, and other scanning nonsense, I quickly made my way to the control room. The terminal handed me complete access on the sixth try. Surprisingly enough, Two didn’t have admin rights, though having learned that players all had their own role, I added myself — Mark — to the white list as an admin. For whatever reason, I didn’t want to see what would happen if I turned off my mimicry. There was every chance the scanners would catch me and trigger the alarm system.
Adding myself, however, turned out to be quite the challenge. The system clearly wasn’t designed for humans, the interface being anything but user-friendly. I was forced to dig deep into the settings before I finally found where roles were assigned — there was a small table buried about as deep as it would go. If I hadn’t known it would be there, I definitely wouldn’t have happened across it.
But even there, as I rubbed my hands in anticipation, I had to bring myself back down to earth. It turned out that there were two types of admins — local and global. And while I had no problem making myself a local admin, there was a problem at the global level. That wasn’t something I could do remotely.
You would like to make yourself a level admin.
Note that level 3 will be taken from Li-Ho-Dun, and you will be responsible for everything that happens subsequently on
the level.
The warning took me aback, though I wasn't exactly sure what could go wrong. It didn’t say anything about informing that Li-whoever. No mor'e control, and that’s that. It’ll be able to focus on other things. But what was I going to be responsible for? Security? Or was I going to have to fix things if they broke?
Suddenly, I saw a vision of someone wiping sweat from their forehead as they agonized between two buttons. I wanted to pull the tri
gger, but I just wasn’t sure. But that’s when it hit me — I had Two right there. Why do I have to be the one with access?! If anything went wrong, it would all be the general’s spawn’s problem.
Happy to have a third button to pick from, I adjusted the settings to give Two the role of level admin.
And just about started to regret it... I was still in the system, and it began divulging everything to me — information poured out like a waterfall fed by a mountain river, threatening to bury me under its flow.
Everything w^as controllable. There were the traps, the mines, the mechanisms, the air conditioning system, and wrho-know7s-wrhat else. The third level was underground, and it turned out to be two or three times as big as the second level. Intriguingly, there were five spaces marked personal room. I didn’t recognize any of the names of the players, though I could guess what they used the storage for. It had to be where they dumped their valuables, the supplies they were counting on to push them to the top in the next release.
And it was that thought that helped me survive the information overload. Going from room to room, I handed control to myself, the real me that time, quickly turning game real estate into my new game belongings.
The furniture, walls, and doors didn’t give me a lot, with everything at about the same price as I’d found on the second level. But the security system... That was something. None of the individual elements were worth much, though together the haul rang in at 1.5 billion coins. Heading back up to the second level, I cursed ornately — everything on the floor had to be sold separately rather than as a single system. And yes, that was still another half a billion, but if I’d known about the possibility just a bit sooner... Damn it! I could have solved so many problems right then and there.
The syringe with 848,000 attribute points printed out and slipped into my leg. There we go! Three hours later, I was going to be ready for my named items to jump up to level forty. The next goal was to boost all my attributes and skills to level 190, though I wasn’t ready to think about that yet. I decided to just stick with the ones I needed until I had the requisite ten billion. It w^as pointless before then.
World of the changed 3 Noa in the flesh Page 10
