[Message from: Andrew Hattorigan (Director)]

[Message to: Lackron Whitehouse (Director)]

[Encryption schema: Magenta codex rev. 2.3]

[Medium: Voice message, autotranscription as follows:]

————— [Message Begin] —————

WHITEHOUSE! [unintelligible yelling, sentiment analysis: Infuriated (0.98)] … JUST WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING? LOOK, I GET BEING THE ONLY EGGHEAD ON THE BOARD GIVES YOU SOME LEEWAY, BUT THIS IS JUST TOO MUCH. PROJECT HAWKING IS THE FUTURE AND IT’S NOT YOUR PET. YOU CAN’T JUST SNATCH IT AND—

[Heavy breathing noises: (0.96)]

Alright. Look: I get that Project Hawking is your baby, but at this point, we can’t let it out of our sight. It needs to be in a SECURE FACILITY and not spending downtime at your private planetside lab. The amount of money we’ve sunk into that thing, it’s just… well, you were at the board meetings; you know. So far none of the others have found out about you absconding with the device, so, how about you just bring it back to the secure facility on Prime, and then both you and I will just forget that this MAJOR BREACH IN SECURITY ever happened. Okay? Okay.

[muttered curses: (0.99)]

————— [Message End] —————

[Magenta codex rev. 2.3 compels message self-deletion]

[***You will only be able to read or listen to this message once***]

When I left home for university, I’d been warned that I’d need to fight off all sorts of radicalization attempts; or at least that’s what the corpo-feeds had primed me for. According to them, public universities and similar institutions were nothing more than breeding grounds for groups with anti-corporate sentiment.

Wonder of wonders, they weren’t wrong. Halfway through my first semester, I’d made a couple good friends, gone to a meeting, and suddenly I’d found myself sitting in the local OSPF party headquarters. At first, of course, I was shocked. How could people that I’d befriended and seemed perfectly reasonable and rational on surface support such radical ideas? I mean, according to what I’d been taught, installing the OSPF’s third-rate ware was tantamount to suicide, and everyone in the “Open-Source Personal Freedom” party was just a future terrorist in the making. Give them a push—or so the edutainment feeds claimed—and a single bad day would make the average OSPF member decide to go detonate a pocket nuke in the nearest transit hub or corporate park.

Despite my initial misgivings though, I stuck with that group of friends. They didn’t care that I was still running corpo-ware, and, well, they were just nice people. Also, the more that I learned about the local branch of the party, the more benign it all appeared: they’d never even nuked a single transit hub after all! Mostly, it was just the organizing of peaceful protests, handing out fliers, running late night hackathons, and participating in diverse fundraising activities. The most illegal thing that ever happened at the local branch—according to what I was aware of at the time—was petty vandalism: Logos and slogans digisprayed onto walls, billboards, and over top of other fliers during half-baked (and often inebriated) bouts of college-student late-night revelry.

Handing out fliers and drinking way too much wasn’t all that happened during those semesters though; gradually, I began to learn the truth about the “Combined Interest Progressive Party”. First though, a little background:

In the modern world, one of the most important choices that one must make is the decision of what “ware” to use. On the one side, there’s the CIPP and their proprietary hard- and software which comes in various flavors from each megacorporation. Provided one has the credits or is willing to give up one’s personal freedom, CIPP-ware is high-quality, functional, and gets updates quickly. On the other hand, there’s the OSPF party and their open-source software offerings: functional and free, it’s a good but not complete alternative. Most cutting-edge features are restricted to CIPP ware and lots of areas, jobs, and equipment require it to interface properly.

The big point of contention, which is the bulwark on which the OSPF party was formed and which it passionately defends, is that if you’re running CIPP ware, you’re not permitted to have root or admin privileges on yourself. Those are reserved for whatever corporation your personal ware was minted by. This lack of privileges is—to OSPF members—the ultimate violation of personal privacy, self, and human rights in general.

Of course, any corporation will tell you that it would never stop a client’s heart, watch the world through their eyes, or subtly influence their thought processes to ensure brand loyalty. These assurances are, quite obviously, lies. There are many documented cases of people who are running some corporate ware who suddenly start finding product placement in their memories and avoiding OSPF and other “subversive” news sources to a statistically significant degree. Hell, if one gives conspiracy theories any credence at all, countless mysterious deaths, often written off as “viral infections”, can be attributed back to corporate assassination. When one depends, day in and day out on complex code to keep one’s heart beating, brain thinking, and millions of internal nanobots in their harmonious synchronized dance, not having control over such a system is the stuff of nightmares.

Eventually, this put me in something of an awkward situation: ever since the first semester, I’d been working at the local Helix Corporation research facility as an assistant. Most of my work was rather menial, but it was a good student’s job: I gained “workplace experience” at a financial pittance, but I could pick and choose my hours with complete freedom. Consequently, it also put off adopting any OSPF ware for the time being. To even step on the facility’s grounds, I had to be running CIPP ware, and to walk past the secretary’s desk, I had to be running Helix Corporation’s flavor of ware specifically. Fortunately, I could afford the ad-free version, as working directly for Helix gave me a generous discount.

This eventually led me to my first semi-serious criminal activity that wasn’t petty vandalism: Namely, attending OSPF meetings wasn’t illegal but it was something that left dark black marks in a résumé—I wanted to hide those. To do so, the local OSPF party tech savant, an old man that everyone simply called Blackbeard, hooked me up with a basic (and illegal) disguise software package. With it, so long as I wasn’t deep-scanned during the course of a criminal investigation, I could attend as many OSPF meetings as I wanted without Helix ever picking up on it.

This situation, with me nominally being an OSPF member but having a corpo-job, eventually led to me accepting a mission that, in retrospect, was a huge mistake.

I sat in a dark backroom office of my local OSPF party headquarters. This room didn’t have any windows, and I’d only heard about it from my friends in muttered whispers. This was the “dark room”. It was probably the single most illegal thing that the local OSPF had, at least to my knowledge at the time. The dark room was designed to block surveillance. According to those muttered whispers, even under the highest scrutiny, the sensor baffling that lined the walls and the six active camouflage projection systems which surrounded the room would render it as a blind spot to anything short of direct physical infiltration. That’s why, when Claire, the local party Admin, closed the door and all my connections cut off, I only jumped in place a little—I’d been expecting it, but being disconnected is always an unnerving feeling. Suddenly, remote libraries weren’t available, instant lookup just flat-out didn’t work, and the constant pitter-patter of background messaging, news reports, and software pings just stopped. I dealt with it though, and quickly calmed all the subroutines that were freaking out due to having no network connection anymore.

Besides Claire and I, this room had three chairs, a desk with terminal, and Blackbeard. Blackbeard was someone I’d never been able to quite wrap my head around. He was, by all accounts, an incredibly skilled software developer. So good apparently, that some referred to him only as the “Technomancer”. Personally, I’d thought his talent was somewhat wasted here, but then again, I didn’t know his background. Other than his technical skills and an absolutely wicked beard, his other most notable feature was that he was old. This, in itself, was strange. For comparison, Claire the local Admin, was in the prime of her health and while rapidly approaching her 120th birthday. For Blackbeard to appear old, he’d need to be truly ancient or have some weird, probably illegal, body-mod obsession focused on wrinkles. Who’d want to look decrepit?

The running theory among my friends was that he was just old—so old in fact, that he remembered pre-CIPP times. I—being unsatisfied with that explanation—had tried to get some answers out of him myself after a meeting one day but I hadn’t been successful. Blackbeard had taken my question and run with it, dragging me with him through an hour-long dissertation on how standard age-therapy treatments were just subtle attempts at corpo-mind control, and were thus, obviously evil. Curiously, he never actually got around to answering my actual question.

Claire and Blackbeard sat down, and Claire motioned for me to sit too. I did, unsure to where this was going.

“Alright Elise, I’m glad that you decided to come to this little talk with us today” Claire said.

Nervously, I responded, “Yeah, sure, uh… so what’s this about anyways?”

Claire nodded, “Alright, straight to the point, but first, could you please brace yourself?”

I nodded hesitantly, having absolutely no clue what to brace myself for, and she turned to Blackbeard, giving him a signal “Could you?”

The old man gave a grunt, closed his eyes, and a second later all my internal anti-virus and security alerts went off simultaneously in a headache-inducing cacophony. I, totally spooked, jumped clear out of my chair. Before I had time to properly panic though, those alerts were silenced again, and I noticed some temporary changes. I was shocked, and a bit freaked out.

“What the hell!?” I yelled.

Claire made a calming gesture with her hands, “Please Elise, take a seat. You’ll be fine, and I’m very, very sorry. We just needed to make sure that Helix’s recording capabilities on your ware were temporarily suspended, nothing more.”

I noticed that I was standing, and shakily sat down. Being hacked wasn’t an everyday occurrence. Hell, it wasn’t something that was supposed to happen to anyone ever. In the entertainments, someone being hacked was usually the prelude to mind-controlling them, turning them into a sleeper agent, stealing their memories, or doing something equally nefarious. Here, the decrepit old man had been able to do it within the span of a couple heartbeats. My panic was pushed to the side and it was replaced by a cold fear and a vaguely violated feeling. I trusted Claire and Blackbeard, right? I’d known them for several years now, but what else did this mean? Just how vulnerable to hacking had I been if it’d been so trivial for Blackbeard?

Nervously, I took a quick peek at my internals. At a glance, everything seemed alright: most of my error messages were springing up due to various services being unable to reach any networks. The hack that Blackbeard applied was also obvious, and to my relief, easy to understand. I knew that if I wanted to, I could undo it with a thought. Furthermore, cursory examination revealed that its function was rather simple, and exactly what Claire had said it was. Right now, all my senses weren’t being recorded into non-volatile storage. If I power-cycled, or refreshed my temporary memory banks, I’d be able to instantly forget everything that happened in this room. I took some calming breaths and refocused on my surroundings.

“Alright, so what is all this secrecy about, and why couldn’t you warn me about that?” I asked while valiantly attempting to keep my voice steady and level.

Speaking in an expositive tone, Claire said, “Basically, if we’d told you what we were going to do before we did it, we’d also have had to remove that memory—the hack you’re running now is simple and only blocks the long-term storage of new memories.”

I thought about that explanation. Sure, it made sense, but it didn’t ease the uncomfortable feeling that being hacked had left me with. Regardless though, the part of me that was burning with curiosity at what this was all about motioned for Claire to go on.

Claire locked her eyes on mine, waited a beat, and then spoke:

“We’ve been presented with an opportunity. Blackbeard has been secretly working on a fork of experimental OSPF ware for a while now, and we believe that it’s ready to be used in the field. The… unique features of this ware make you the ideal candidate to be our first adopter. Primarily, in the eyes of the corpos, you’re not connected to the OSPF and, of all the members in this local branch of the OSPF, you’re running the purest flavor of corpo-ware.”

“Now, we know you’ve been considering switching over to OSPF ware for a while now, and we were wondering if you’re willing to make the switch soon.”

They were right. I’d been a “member” of the OSPF for six-and-a-bit semesters now, but due to having my job at the Helix Research Center, I’d been reluctant to switch over. Getting a job isn’t easy after all. The past semester though… I’d been seriously considering ditching the Helix job and getting myself fitted with OSPF ware; I was just looking for the right opportunity and saving up my credits. Even though OSPF ware isn’t restricted, didn’t mean that it’s completely free. Sure, the software is a free download, but new nanobots and embedded hardware have material costs and assembly fees that need to be paid, even if their design files are available to everyone for free.

As for what Claire was asking? Well, it was quite obvious: If this were an entertainment, this would be the point where the hero is asked to go on a dangerous mission. In fact, this was the exact moment that all the corporate propaganda had primed me for; this was the next step in becoming a pocket-nuke wielding, anti-corporate radical element. The severity of Claire’s expression, and the fact that we were in the infamous black room simply enhanced how serious this conversation felt. They didn’t want me to plaster up a slogan somewhere or hand out some fliers, this was the “real deal”. Am I willing to take the next step? I wasn’t sure at the time, and I needed to know more, so I asked:

“What’s this special experimental fork do? What exactly do you want me to do?”

Claire turned her gaze to Blackbeard and gave him a nod. Then, Blackbeard began explaining in his old, wizened and wizardly voice:

“Ah, well, I’ve finally completed it, my grand masterpiece so to speak. This new system is—and pardon my self-aggrandizing—pure, distilled, genius. I call it… Matryoshka-firmware.”

I was confused. Normally I’d just look up the information but without the network, I’d have to figure it out the old-fashioned way.

“What’s a ‘matryoshka’?” I asked.

“Ah, well, it is an old thing, but I think it fits the concept quite well. Matryoshka are—were—toys for children, multiple wooden shells nested within each other. Each shell was painted similarly to a person, and often the seams between shells were well disguised. When the outer shell was removed, a new person—a new soul—would be revealed within. This new person is painted differently, but also, only a shell. Every shell appears real to the outside but hides a whole collection of souls within itself. Do you understand now?”

“Alright…? But what exactly does this new ware do?”

“Perhaps I should be clearer, it allows one to ‘stack’ different wares into ‘shells’ around people. More technically, my Matryoshka firmware allows full virtu-physical sandboxed instancing of black-box obfuscated proprietary wares and supports full software and hardware emulation without having to crack any pesky encryptions by using pass-through authentication.”

“I’m not sure—”

Claire cut in, seeing that Blackbeard was about to start rambling and the technobabble was getting to me: “What he means, is that with the new Matryoshka firmware we are able to ‘stack’ different wares without them being aware of each other. Specifically, we want to remove your current Helix corpo-ware, transform it into a ‘shell’ and then install OSPF-ware ‘underneath’ with Matryoshka. Then, we’ll be able to ‘cloak’ you with the shell of Helix corpo-ware. Externally, and to all scans and queries, you’ll still appear to be running standard Helix corpo-wear but underneath, OSPF ware will be running in a stealth mode. This will let you pass through corpo-only zones, like the Helix Research Center, while still running OSPF-ware.”

The picture of where this was going became clearer quickly. With this new stealth system, this “Matryoshka”, I’d be able to have the best of both worlds: I’d be able to enter corporate zones, operate corporate equipment, and interface with their computers without any problems. In fact, if I’m running OSPF underneath, that would make me the ideal spy. I’d be able to look at redacted information without Helix being able to censor it from vision or memory.

“You want me to steal something don’t you?”

Claire bared her teeth said, “Well, not ‘steal’ per se: copy. Nothing will go missing.”

“What exactly do you want me to copy?”

Claire’s already suspect grin grew positively wicked, “We want you to copy a Key.”

Oh my. I understood what they were after. Claire didn’t say “key”, she said, “Key”—Key with a capital “K”. I more than understood; it made sense to me. Obtaining a corporate Key was any OSPF party member’s sweetest fantasy. With a Key, corpo-ware could be decrypted, deobfuscated, and reverse engineered. As far as I knew, the last time a Key had been pilfered by the OSPF was around forty years ago, during a high risk OSPF commando raid on a smaller corporation’s data center a few systems over. The slew of OSPF-ware updates and upgrades that had come from reverse-engineering that flavor of corpo-ware had pushed the OSPF-ware and party from “fringe” or “enthusiast only” to something that—while far from mainstream—didn’t brand you as an outcast immediately. People with OSPF-ware started being able to compete, albeit at a small scale, with corpo-ware users.

It was obvious.

“You want me to steal a Helix Key”

“We want you to steal a Helix Key”

That was big. Helix was big. In this sector of colonized space, Helix was the top dog. On a larger scale, they weren’t, but being ranked 12th of all the megacorporations in human space wasn’t anything to sneeze at. If the OSPF were to get their hands on a Helix Key or even a partial one, well, it would cause major upheaval to state it mildly. But what could I do?

“They don’t store any Keys at the local Helix research facility, right? The one where I work?” I almost didn’t want to know the answer.

Claire paused, and then spoke:

“Our intel suggests that one partial Key is stored at the research facility. The one where you work.”

Oh, fuck.

Claire continued, “And our intel on this is as solid as it gets.”

I’m going to do this, aren’t I?