Data Kill: 1. D@ily Gr1nd

An ongoing story serially posted at the forum for Trese Brother's Games Set in the world of Cyber Knights RPG 
Written by Paxdad Trese Brothers Forum Discussion Thread Data Kill: 1. D@ily Gr1nd Liberty Square D@ily Gr1nd Espresso Bar Public Data Hub 12.2.423.5 02:46:34.10, 03/02/2217 The smell of espresso, the hiss of steam and the bustle of the cafe surrounded DAT. This was his idea of hiding in plain sight. Blend in with the Domers, constantly on the move, prowling the streets for action, what was one more sack of meat in the crowd, right? This same philosophy dominated his hacking as well. Blend in with the countless harmless terabytes of data, ghost off of public hubs and portals, run down the encrypted pathways of Darknet, out of sight out of mind his parents used to tell him. It may not have been scientific but it tended to keep the heat off, and had kept him alive this long. Tonight he had been busy, he’d ripped several B class Corps, with C class security before they’d even known he was there, then turned around and sold the paydata to the highest bidder almost as fast. Now he was just monitoring traffic killing time on a Friday night.
He was just about to pull the plug and drop back into the bustling squalor of New Boston when a peculiar algorithm caught his attention. A small green blip of light amongst the data towers, hitting a secure system with multiple low level attacks. Amature night on parade! Finally something worth watching. The amusement was short lived. There was the briefest recognition that something was wrong before DAT’s stack overflowed and crashed under a bombardment of data noise! Had he not been running a hardened system, his deck would have succumbed to this first wave as if hit by a tsunami. Someone had quietly breached his firewall while his attention was diverted and dumped a shit load of white noise and data corruption into his memory buffers. DAT’s construct was crashing fast! A microsecond longer and his secrets would belong to whomever was pillaging his deck! A moments desperation lent speed to his response. Faster than thought he isolated his construct in a fortified partition then set loose the hornets! Fast moving strings of hunter killer programs and security agents to re-establish system stability. His trace program almost had a lock on the rogue code tendril as it was racing for open cyberspace. The intruder was keeping a port open through his firewall that he could not lock down! His trace was closing in faster and faster as system integrity returned, he almost had him, when just like that...it vanished into the stream before he could lock it up and deal a killing blow! “Damn!” thought DAT, did that just happen? “Sloppy!” he cursed himself. He’d grown complacent being the big fish in the stream. It had been a long time since anyone had had the guts to try to rip his system. For years now, he had remained invisible to all but the most adept deck jockey’s. He had just experienced a moment of carelessness and gotten caught with his pants down. Reality check! That kind of rookie mistake got chummers fried or worse. Still even as he sent his backtrace bloodhounds into the virtual night, he had to smile, and admired greatly, the finesse and skill with which the would be pirate had just lit up his system.