15A/N - I know this is a rather short update. I've had a bit of an issue after seeing Instinct and it shook my ability to write Bering & Wells. In fact, so much so they are not in this update. Please take heed of the quote below, I chose it for a reason. Additionally, I am not a hacker. I have no knowledge of hacking, well, other than rooting my phone. So if anything I've written below is factually incorrect I'm sorry. Maybe. ~ Catt
"Patience is power.
Patience is not an absence of action;
rather it is "timing"
it waits on the right time to act,
for the right principles
and in the right way."
― Fulton J. Sheen
\*/
Claudia hit the enter button and held her breath as the program ran. Coming up with a security package on the fly, and while offline, was not the easiest thing to do. It's kinda hard to test something without actually testing it, she mused to herself. When she was hacking the warehouse she could do it in real time. Offense versus defense, it was a whole new game now. Artie was far from savvy enough to have stopped her, but he did learn his lesson, hence the unplugging. Simple, yet very effective. She wished she had though of it! Although, it is why they worked so well together. She did the high-level tech things while Artie kept his eyes a little closer to the ground. She's never told him any of this though. It was hard enough keeping papa bear's ego in check.
"Are you done?" Jinks voice cut through her ruminations.
"It's running. We'll have to go online to see if it works."
"Tell me again what you're doing?"
"I'm creating a mirror of our system, but not really." Glancing at him, she noticed his confused look. Turning her attention away from the machine and focusing on him, she continued.
"Think of it like a photocopy of a tree. From a distance, you can see all the branches and maybe even the little things, like leaves and maybe dew on a leaf. But, if you were to try and zoom in for a closer look, it would pixilate. The closer you go, the more distortion you get, until all you see are boxes of blurry color." He nodded that he was with her.
"I'm building an image of our system that's similar, only in 3D. From all angles it will look complete. It's like being able to walk around that same tree, virtually, and seeing it from all sides. It won't be until you get closer that you see it's just a picture. By the time they figure it out, I'll have that naughty hacker who thinks they're smarter than me. No one is better than El Claudio."
Getting an evil look in her eye, she brought her hands up in front of her, and rubbing her palms together in the quintessential evil genius sign, her voice dropped an octave as she hissed out, "I shall destroy their happiness."
"I love it when you go all evil tech queen on me." Steve chuckled. He never should have let her watch Once Upon a Time. She was obsessed with it.
Laughing at him, she angled her right arm across her chest and flashed the devil horns at him. "Evil Regal forever!"
\*/
Artie was pacing the warehouse floor. After his conversation with Mrs. Fredric he was thinking, and nothing helped him more in doing this than making a list of areas that needed to be inventoried.
This situation had to be handled carefully. He really hoped she was right and they could trust that H.G. Wells would not do something monumentally stupid. He still didn't completely trust her. He trusted Myka, but not always when it came to H.G., her priorities were never the same where she was involved. Although, if they screwed this up, he could always make them inventory the Freud section. That would be enough to ruin anyone's day.
\*/
Alec had stayed at his system as long as he could. He kept checking in to see if the other system had come back on line, no luck. He hated waiting, but in truth if it were him, he would be coming up with a really creative way to keep someone like him out. He laughed, that even confused him!
He had spent the next few hours verifying his own system security. It paid to be careful as things could quickly turn, and the hacker could become the hackee. If everything he had learned from Kiera about his future were correct, he would be amazing. He needed to remember that was in the future, and while he was good now, there might very well be someone better. Nah, who was he kidding, he WAS the best.
When his mom called him away, he spent the next few hours completing his chores around the farm. Just when he thought he'd be able to catch up with Kiera, his stepdad decided he needed to attend another meeting. God he hated this shit. He headed to the house to listen to another rant about "… the corporations own us, blah, blah, blah." How about you do something about it rather than just talk? If you hate it so much, then enact change. Passive resistance from a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere certainly didn't change anything.
Instead of saying any of this, he took up his standard position against the farthest wall and settled in to fake interest.
A/N – I promise not to string anyone along for much longer. This needed to be done in order for the next events to make sense. Hope you stay with me!
