Corren’s Farrcom Proteon sped into the driveway to his home, the automated braking system kicking in just in time to stop the vehicle from colliding with the still closed garage door. Jumping out of the coupe Corren broke into a sprint towards the door of his house, right arm outstretched palm facing the center of the main entrance. Reaching the door his hand slammed into the entry pad with a thud. Corren flinched as pain shot through his hand emanating from the points of contact. Two short beeps from the speaker slits of the console and the two halves of the door quickly retreated into the wall. Corren leapt through the open doorway sliding his left hand over a smaller console just were the left half of the door had disappeared to, before hitting the floor with an even louder thud. Just as quickly as the door had gone it shot back out and closed, almost silently.
A slow throbbing pain made its presence known to Corren. “Ugh, bruised my shoulder when I hit the floor,” he thought as he braced himself against the floor to stand up. Once on his feet again he began to move towards his office. Reaching his desk he placed the hand that was currently not still throbbing and connected to his stinging shoulder, on his desk. A bar of blue light spanning the widest points that his hand occupied on the desk bloomed into existence under his wrist. With an air of smooth or rather sleekness to it, it moved across the desk beneath his hand, just past the tip of his middle finger. With its task seemingly completed it vanished just as it had appeared, and the desk sprang to life. A solid stream rose from the desk showing the image of a phoenix rising from ashes, displayed while this was occurring. Having grabbed the neural transmission headset during this process, he put it on his head and activated it.
MIRG is one of the late 21st century’s greatest achievements. It works by comparing the electrical impulses the brain generates when processing an image through sight with those given during memory recall. The process requires calibration to be able to comply with each subject’s neural network. The ability to record multiple images at once was added as a later feature and used by police and other law enforcement bodies on people who could, for any number of reasons not focus on a single image or event.
“Initialize image recording,” Corren said trying to recall the emblem on the chest of the man he had left unconscious in the storage room. He also tried to recall the man’s face. Two images began to form in the solid stream, the first began as a simple circle, then a crescent formed inside the circle, a line sprouted from each corner of the crescent growing through its center, but before meeting at the top split into two diagonal lines opposing one another. From the line silver began to bleed filling the crescent, in the triangle made up of the diagonal lines a circuit template began to form. The second image had moved out of the stream and was now a three dimensional projection of a head hovering ominously over the desk. It looked like Loki. “This is the man that tried to kill me,” thought Corren as he removed the headset.
The I³O search was probably one of the greatest innovations of the early 21st century. I³O means ‘Image Input Image Output’ and basically boils down to this: The original idea was to find images similar to the ones you had found. This quickly was adapted to find images you were looking for which you had seen before by comparing a drawing you created to the images available. For example: If you has seen a logo you particularly liked and wanted to know more about this logo or find more images of it you could draw what you remembered of it and the search would take care of the rest returning images of the logo on the Net. This tool became much more helpful with the invention of MIRG technologies. Mental Image Retrieval and Generation, involves a neural recorder of some kind as well the MIRG software to recreate the images from thoughts or memories. Due to security reasons no MIRG program is allowed to contain direct Net access as a feature and must contain warnings if indirect access is used.
“Save images,” commanded Corren, several images appeared on the desk, he tapped a circular icon with a silver border and a green fill, four black lines crossed at the center as well as one glowing line half their size which was spinning in an anti-clockwise motion. Several glowing dots appeared randomly in the green area that the line had just passed, these then slowly began to fade away as more appeared.
“Image search. Input. Search files. Two most recent.”
“He’s performing an I³O search, what are your orders Thor?” Tyr looked up from his solid stream.
Thor turned as he spoke, “Return a null result and block all outgoing communications.”
“Understood,” affirmed Tyr before beginning to mumble quietly, seemingly to himself. “What the Flux?!”
“What is it Tyr?”
“Someone is trying, and succeeding in accessing the house mainframe from the Net.”
“Stop them!”
“They shouldn’t have been able to get in to begin with. I added an additional layer of security to the ones already in place, but this guy has just passed straight through them, the only reason I actually know someone got past it is that they are streaming petabytes of files into the house.”
Corren jumped as a loud ping sound shot out of the speakers of his desk. Looking at it he realized that the entire desk was now glowing red, as were all the lights in his house. Cautiously walking towards his desk he realized that the screen read.
‘Please Confirm Successful Entry.’
“What in the three cities?” thought Corren, staring at the black letters, which seemed to be growing in size on his now red solid stream. Looking down on his desk there was a second message in somewhat friendlier writing that read.
‘Just say “Entry Confirmed”. Everything will be explained soon enough.’
“Entry Confirmed, said Corren hesitantly, half expecting his house to suddenly shut down or explode. As soon as he had finished pronouncing the ‘D’ the lights in the house returned to their normal settings and the red vanished from the desk and solid stream. The message was quickly replaced with a flood of information; documents, images, videos and holo-projection icons. When the information had seemingly stopped, the word ‘Seraphine’ appeared in large letters at the top of his stream, below this five similar emblems materialized. The one at the center looked almost identical to the one which he had drawn and searched for. A search which seemed to have reaped a rather fruitful result, although it had come in a rather unexpected manner. The center emblem flashed and then grew filling the stream, the message ‘You saw a man with this emblem of his chest, Yes?’ Slightly less hesitant this time Corren answered the message, “Yes.”
‘Come to Sorren.’
Sorren is one of the three oceanic cities. The city is well known for housing the world’s economic data and is home to many of the world’s banks and financial institutions. The university is not only famous for its business school but also for its dedication to history and the storage thereof. It was the first of the three to be built and the smallest of the three. It is located in the Pacific Ocean.
“How am I supposed to do that?” asked Corren feeling much less hesitant but slightly annoyed at the proposition of having to cross an ocean as well as a continent in his current state.
‘Please place your Identification on your desk along with your wallet.’
Corren took his wallet out of his pocket, removed his ID and placed it on the desk. A sky blue circle formed around it, more data suddenly appeared on the desk and zipped towards it disappearing as it collided with the ring. Curious to see if something similar would happen on placing the wallet on the desk Corren did so. A new message appeared on the stream.
‘You will take the Hydris.’
The Hydris is one of the largest ground effect aircrafts currently in operation, which regularly travels between Atlantis and Sorren via the Arctic Circle. It is not the fastest way of traveling between the two cities, it is however one of the more scenic ones.
‘Please place your communicator on your desk.’
Corren resigning his hesitation placed his HermesTech Nox communicator on the desk and watched as data streamed into the device. “What are you doing?” he asked whoever was on the other end of the communication.
‘Your communicator is being linked to a secure communications satellite I have acquired. All future communications with this device are now untraceable to anyone without access to this satellite. I am also increasing the security of the device itself. I will explain any further details once you arrive.’
‘Please prepare anything you would like to take with you as you will not be returning to your residence anytime soon.’
“Any luck with cutting the communication to the house?” Thor asked watching the solid streams in front of him.
“I can’t seem to be able to do anything to this connection. I’ve tried intercepting it, which should be the easiest even if I wouldn’t be able to know what it says now do to the encryption we could eventually find out. I can’t even do that though, let alone stop it, or trace it. It seems to be coming from everywhere simultaneously, even my own station, which isn’t possible. What this person is doing is not possible and yet it is the only explanation for why I cannot do anything to this connection.” Tyr explained frustrated by this feeling of helplessness slowly creeping through him. He was supposed to be one of the best the Seraphine had to offer when it came to the Net and yet he could no longer access a single terminal in the house of his target.
“While this turn of events does not make me feel comfortable, it should not have too large a bearing on what needs to be done. The target will either try to barricade himself within his house or try to escape. If the former is the case then we breach and capture. I assume you are monitoring all Police and Security communications for any mention of the Target.”
“First thing I set up.”
“Good, then if the latter is true he should be gathering whatever he doesn’t want to leave behind and should try escaping soon. At that point we can capture him. Prepare the EMP to disable any vehicles he may try to use in his escape.”
“Understood.”
Corren approached his desk, the travel case at his side. “I’m ready,” he affirmed.
‘Good, the preparations are almost complete however there is one more thing I will need you to do before you leave your home.’