[hider=I've Totally Done This Before]
A lithe girl with hip-length brown hair and square-framed glasses she didn’t actually need stood outside a bank. She was wearing a blue polo shirt with a matching baseball cap. In one hand was a clipboard she was holding to her chest in the other was a burner phone in a black trouser pocket, and that’s all she needed to rob the place. Well, that or get herself killed. 

She’s told her girlfriends she’s robbed banks before and that’s true, but it’s not really the whole truth either. 

So yeah. Fiona had robbed banks before, back on Thrones, when physical port entry was as vulnerable as taking a diamond drill to a piece of wall in the bank’s reception, then looking like she’d fallen asleep with her head pressed against the hole she’d drilled. Pull some cabling into the neural link in the back of her neck, where her spinal column met her skull, and there she had it. Hacking with a direct neural-link to the brain had been stupid-dangerous, but she was incredible at it, so the risk just felt like a skill issue. 

This time she was outside an Orochi Bank in Zeus on Aevum, its governmental district, the seat of power. Probably its safest district, especially for banks. She’d spent hours on a train to get here specifically; This was the place she’d chosen to practice physically robbing a bank. 

She wasn’t going to go in guns blazing, the old fashioned way. Bank robbery wasn’t a transferable skill like that, no amount of knowing how to use a command line will make you good at giving command lines, let alone make you a commando. Still, she was going to have to [i]physically into the place she was robbing[/i] to rob it, and that was a new kind of stupid-dangerous for her. And she had no idea if she was going to be good at this or not.

She took a deep breath, and then she got into character. 

Fiona headed through the glass double doors and straight for the employee area, behind the money counters and the ceiling-high bullet proof glass. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the lobby had a nice fountain, but she had to pretend she didn’t care how pretty it was. She had to pass through the reception lobby with the eight or nine people waiting on benches and pretend she didn’t see anything for the plan to work.

The door had a heavy metal frame that blocked all its edges from shimmying or other physical attacks. She knocked. 

A teller with frizzy red hair and green eyes leaned over her desk with suspicious eyes. “Can I help you?”

“Ah, hi, uh…?” Fiona tilted her head.

“Fran.”

“Fran. Thank you, listen, they’re expecting me. I’m here to do server maintenance. Can you buzz me through?” 

Moment of truth. This was supposed to be the hardest door she needed to get through today. At least failing here was safe, just kind of embarrassing. If she got stopped now what would they even charge her with?

Fran threw a hand up to flag a guard in the teller area, a guy with a loaded gun at his hip and a kevlar vest. He had a head like an entire glazed ham, with stubbly black hair like a dusting of pepper and he looked like he could probably pick Fiona up by her ankles and swing her against a wall. The guy opened the door and took a step aside for her. 

Just there, just asking to access an employee side computer would have been enough for Fiona to embezzle a hundred thousand, maybe two hundred thousand dollars. She wouldn’t have direct access to the system here, and she’d be fighting against protections that stopped the tellers trying to skim money, so there was an upper limit. It would be the safest play thing to do, though. 

On the other hand, her unicorn girlfriend needed at least four hundred thousand, and said they could launder up to two million. Also there was her other girlfriend, the hegemonic AI swarm of lesbian anime protagonists. Just siphoning from the tellers would not be enough to impress her. How do you even show off for someone like that? Fucking honestly. 

“Ma’am.” The guard behind her coughed, where he was still standing. “I’d like to ask you to come with me please.” 

“Yeah, sure.” Fiona said absentmindedly, checking her clipboard, as her heart began to race. “I’m heading for the server, if you know where that is?”

“Just come with me.” He repeated. 

Fiona walked beside him out of the reception area. He unlocked the next door for her too, and down a bare concrete corridor towards a room of elevators. Fiona ran her fingers to the wall on her right as they walked. It must be the physical vault, she thought. Gold bars were a bit dated, but there was still plenty of reason for people to keep safety deposit boxes. That would have been her target, if she was more… physically inclined. And she’d have made even less than if she’d stuck to the receptionist terminals. 

It wasn’t just that gold had lost most of its value when they started mining meteors. Physical currency, like paper bills and coins, those had been phased out because they were mostly just tools for crime in the fiat era. She thought about how shallow the vault was, how soon they were at the elevators. 

“What are you laughing at?” the glazed-ham guard looked down at her. 

“I was just thinking it’s not even worth robbing a bank these days. There’s nothing left to steal.” 

Ham-head thought that was pretty funny too, but he tried not to smile about it. “You’d be surprised. Lot of people smuggling weapons in here, threatening people to delete their loans. Add a zero to their account. Everyone here knows to do what they ask and we just undo it when they’re safe.” 

“So why are you guys even still here, right?” Fiona joked. 

“People still try to sneak in and use the computers themselves. Don’t worry, we’ve gotten really good at dealing with that.” He gave Fiona’s shoulder a firm grip for a moment and squeezed. His hand was like a vice grip. “Wait here. Don’t move.” 

“Sure.” She checked her phone, then looked up at him. “You don’t mind if I look at my phone, right?” 

“Just stay here if you do.” He said, and went around a corner. Fiona could still hear him talking to someone, but she couldn’t make out the words he was saying. 

She didn’t know her heart could beat that fast what the [i]fuck[/i]. Did he know, was he fucking with her? Or was he genuinely just, trying to reassure her she was safe? What the [i]fuck[/i]. 

She checked her burner phone. She had so many people she wanted to call right now, but no way was she putting someone else’s ass in her fire. Instead she brought up the app she had, connected to a microcontroller on the bank roof. She could cut the power, still, and the lines out. Neither helped her. Power to the elevators wouldn’t help her either. 

The only thing that would help her right now was the fire alarm. If she hit that, all the security locks between her and the exit would be deactivated for safety reasons. But she had to be sure, and she had to do it now. And she’d look guilty as hell when she ran. 

Wow. Super fucking lame. 

She put the phone back in her pocket. 

Ham-head came back. “Cool. Stay with me again.” 

Fiona nodded as he fat-fingered an up button. The servers were down a floor, in the basement, where there wasn’t any window access. “So people try to sneak in?” She asked, just making conversation. 

“Oh, yeah.” The third elevator in the line dinged, and he kept talking as he led Fiona into it. It was surprisingly wide, and carpeted, with nice handrails. It must be for the offices upstairs too, not just the service floors. Fiona made a note of that vulnerability for later, while Ham-head pressed for floor 5. “Usually at night. Most of the time they’ve stolen someone’s I.D badge, or they go in through the vents-”

“People fit in the vents?” 

He snorted. “Weight sensors all through them, though. You get locked in a section with nobody to let you out until morning. And if you get trapped in one of the server vents, that thing gets sauna temperatures. We had one lady die of heat stroke from it, took six hours. Bank got sued for it, but we won because it’s a safety thing, and she wasn’t meant to be there.” 

Fiona went very, very pale. “So, if I get stuck in the server rooms, don’t go out through the vents.” 

“Horrible way to die.” Ham-head agreed cheerfully. “Stolen I.D badge too, if it’s flagged it’ll only work in one direction. You can get in, you just can’t get out with it. You’d be surprised how many people get Roach Motel’d with it.” He considered that. “Not here, though. Nobody really tries that here. More pf a Hermes thing.”

“Why’s that?” 

“Too many cameras all around Zeus.” Ham-head sounded proud and uncomfortable in equal measure, like at least it [i]was[/i] big brother watching him, and not someone outside the family. “Harder to get away with stalking a bank employee and getting away with robbing them, anyway. Finding the right person to rob, who’s not going to have someone notice they’re missing before you can make your break in.” He shrugged. “Orochi tries to hire people with families because of it, doesn’t stop some people though.”

“Jesus.” Fiona whispered. “Wouldn’t it be so much easier to, I dunno, just spoof a card? Take a blank and clone it with someone’s I.D?” 

“I guess.” Ham-head smacked his lips. “Reckon if you’re smart enough to do that, though, you’re smart enough to not do something as stupid as try to rob a bank.”

“Yeah?”

“Lady, I dunno how to tell you this, but I mean, it’s only the dumbest idiots ever born that think they’re smart enough to get away with it.” He laughed as the doors opened on floor five.

“I bet I could do it.” She said. “If I wanted to.” 

“How’d you do it, then?” He led her down an open-plan desk floor, through a glass wall with a locked push door. Through a wide room of desk islands of people handling loans, business loans, personal loans, that kind of thing. They walked towards a room that sat at the corner like an interrogation room. The walls were a tinted glass that could be made clear or matte black and everything in between, and now they were clear. 

Inside was an android in a blue suit, and a large scarred woman in the same uniform as ham-head. They watched her the entire approach, waiting for her. There was a desk in the middle of the room with a computer on it, two uncomfortable looking black plastic chairs on either side of the desk, and nothing else. The room had a menacing aura even before you were close enough to see the bloodstains in the carpet. 

“I’ve done it before.” Fiona laughed. “I was actually about to do it again now; You should see how much I charge by the hour.” 

“Fuck off.” Ham-head grinned. He rapped his knuckles on the glass. 

“Thank you, you can leave now.” The android called out. “Come on through, Miss.” 

Ham-head gave a nod as he turned and headed back for the elevators at a jog. Fiona was sad to see him go - it would have helped to have a face that was, if not friendly, at least familiar. Fiona pushed through the glass door, and the android pressed a button on his desk that frosted the glass over. Privacy but not secrecy. 

The android stood up and offered a hand across the table. “I’m Elba Sheen, for 3-13.” Fiona looked to the woman, but she didn’t offer her hand, and Elba made no effort to introduce her. She was meant to focus on him, then. “Who did you say you were?” 

“I didn’t, but, Sam Williams, for Samanatha. I’m here to do server maintenance. You should have gotten an email?” 

“We did.” Elba brought it up on his computer to confirm it - or at least, he brought something up on his computer, Fiona couldn’t see his side of the screen. He was almost entirely human looking, pale with a black private-school side-part. The biggest tell were the visible seams that ran along the contours of his face like tribal tattoos, exposed metal plating. The red eyes, too, had a backlit glow to them. On someone else it might have looked try-hard edgelord, but Elba just wore the spooky-eyes in a way that just looked correct, like he’d look wrong without it. “There must have been a mistake. We run a proprietary operating system and driver, you will not be needed today.” 

Those spooky fuck-off eyes made something very clear - what he was really saying was leave, and we’ll pretend this never happened.

Did Fiona honestly, sincerely believe she was better than this fucking guy? That her stupid little play would be enough to get past a professional security team? That her flimsy bullshitting would fly?

“Hardware’s still Quatrain Instruments, though. We’re still contracted for that.” 

Fuck [i]you[/i], she did. 

Fiona took her hand-stitched Quatronic Instruments baseball cap and held it up for inspection. Crystal’s contribution, that and the polo shirt. The custom email address looked authentic, too. Elba made a dismissive gesture, and Fiona put her hat back on. “The vulnerability you sent is software.”

“Caused by hardware. Yes, look, we have cases of accounts being able to jump security permissions by-” 

“Software.” Elba cut her off. “I’m not an idiot. You’re describing software. Leave.”

Fiona glared. “From proximal locations in quatronic storage. Hardware that [i]causes[/i] software problems. No.” Arguing with the head of security while she was robbing a bank was extremely stupid, and her story was completely bullshit, but also [i]screw [/i]this guy. At least she [i]knew[/i] what she was saying was bullshit, he was just wrong!

“We use a proprietary driver. I talked to our information team and they have told me that our proprietary drivers mean our software is immune to this vulnerability. These specific proximal storage interactions do not exist for us.” 

“Right, but [i]my[/i] legal team made it clear that if we don’t come over and perform that check, then we get sued.” She paused. “Actually, why do I care? Just, tell me you’re okay with voiding your warranty over this so I don’t get yelled at.” 

“Check?” Elba squinted. “You don’t even know?” 

“Well, I mean, if you could clear sending your version of the driver software back, I could test it without accessing your servers?” Fiona offered, trying not to openly salivate. Server access was one thing, but reverse engineering the whole architecture? She could do things that made Polyhedrons infosec team look like a Nigerian prince email. 

The android glared and she wiped the drool from her lips, which wasn’t the reason he said no, but definitely didn’t help. “That was not what was emailed to us.” 

“Well, didn’t know you’d be such a dick about this.” Fiona snickered, and then she looked up at the scary scarred guard lady, and then she gulped because the scary guard lady was clearly looking for excuses to punch her in the face. That was still a problem for her. 

“This was a waste of both of our time.” Elba rolled his eyes. “We’ll do our testing in-house. Juarez, show her out.” 

Ah, lame.

The cyborg grabbed Fiona by the bicep - “Ow! Hey!” - and began marching her back to the elevators. Everyone in the loans cubicles watched her as it happened. Some were shocked, but most were smiling or even just, openly laughing at her. One round guy with a gap in his teeth even wheeled his chair out into the middle of the floor, he was laughing so hard he wanted to get a good view of the whole trip. Dickhead. 

Fiona felt like a shitty little child being dragged off to see the principal. Now the whole school was laughing at her as the teacher hauled her ass off to get thrown out of the building, and for what? 

What did she think was going to happen? 

She’d still been going about this how she used to - everyone but me is stupid, and then I am smarter, and then I win. 

Idiot, dumbass. Now everyone was laughing at her. 

The scarred scary lady guard held her arm hard enough right to the elevator, and Fiona took a quiet bit of pride that even though it was [i]bruised to shit[/i] she hadn’t complained once. She had a heck of a bitemark in her cheek for that one, definitely worth it. 

The guard glared as they waited for the elevator. “I don’t like you.” 

Fiona rubbed the four long purple splotches on her arm, and noted Juarez had even made sure to use a mechanically enhanced hand to do it, complete overkill. “I got that.” 

“See? How are you [i]still [/i]being sarcastic about this?” She growled, like, actually growled like an animal, low in her throat. “You’re an arrogant shit who’s lucky to be walking out of here today. And even when you clearly fucked up, you’re still acting like you’re better than me.”

Fiona’s blood went ice cold. It was one thing to hear it inside her head, but to hear someone else say it? It would have hurt less if Juarez had just punched her in the stomach, no matter which hand she did it with. 

“Go home.” Juarez insisted. Their elevator dinged. “And if you try this shit again, whatever it was, you’re going out in a duffel bag.” 

Fiona nodded. They stepped on to the elevator, and it was quiet. She missed Ham-head. 

“Do you… do you mind if I look at my phone?” Fiona whispered.

“Call your mum to pick you up, I don’t fucking care.” Juarez folded her arms.

Fiona nodded again and opened her app. She waited until they were nearly at the ground floor, long enough that the timing wouldn’t be suspicious. It was long enough for her phone to scan the electromagnetic signals she could read off Juarez ID card, pinned to her belt. Then she killed power to the elevators. 

“Is this supposed to happen?” Fiona asked nervously. Emergency lighting formed a square in the roof, a hatch in the roof out that Fiona wasn’t tall enough to reach on her own. No luck getting out that way. 

Juarez crooked her neck, and listened to a radio implant on the inside of her ear. Fiona couldn’t even hear a crackle of the other side of the conversation, just recognized what she was looking at. “Electrical fault. Everything’s down.”

“Do we use the emergency exits?” 

“No. You sit your ass down in that corner, and we wait for it to get fixed. We might be here for an hour. Don’t try to pull the ‘use the bathroom’ line on me either, you can hold it.” 

And Fiona leaned herself back into the corner, which gave her time to wonder what the hell she was still doing here.

She attached a tether from the bracelet in her left wrist to her phone, and pulled up her macro storage. She slipped the tether from her right bracelet out between her fingers. 

“I don’t think I’m better than you.” Fiona said.

“Well, you act like it.” Juarez stood with her arms crossed facing the unopening door, her back to Fiona. She didn’t even glance at her when replying. 

“Yeah, I was mostly acting though. It’s just kind of the character I play when I rob banks.” 

That got a look back from Juarez. “What? Seriously?”

“Yeah, I mean, it takes a lot of confidence to try and rob a bank. So it helps to be kind of a shitty teenager about things.” 

“No, like, you’re telling me to my face you were trying to rob the bank. Are you actually retarded?”

Fiona cringed. “Okay, could you not use that word, please?”

“Shut the fuck up, you’re acting better than me again.” Juarez turned and stared at Fiona in the corner of the elevator, snorting like a bull about to charge. “What are you telling me for? You trying to make me hit you?”

“Please don’t.” Fiona cringed again. “No, it’s just. I needed a moment to think. And I think what I worked out is I’m still robbing this bank, and I’m still going to get away with it.” She shrugged casually. 

Juarez grabbed her by the bicep again in the same spot and squeezed down on the existing bruises hard. This time it was more painful than anything Fiona could pretend anymore, there was no amount of fronting that could make up for the way the pain shot all the way down to the tips of her fingers - she [i]almost [/i]dropped her phone - but then she grabbed Juarez’s wrist with her other hand, and slipped the tether into the cybernetic wrist. 

Then she her thumb hit the macro on her phone that would invert all the values Juarez sent to her cybernetics. 

Juarez hand opened when she tried to squeeze it shut. Her arm pulled back from the elbow behind her when she tried to throw a punch. Her weight was thrown off bad enough she landed on her ass on the floor. With her other hand, she winced and held her hand to her ear as her comms signals flipped too, filling her ear with painful nonsense. 

“I [i]am[/i] better than you, jerk-ass.” Fiona grunted as she jumped off Juarez’s shoulders when she sat up again, goomba-stomping her way up to the emergency hatch on the ceiling and pulling herself up.

That was a thing she couldn’t do the last time she tried to rob banks - one friggin pullup. She’d never needed to. 

Deep breath. Silent prayer of thanks to her android girlfriend for getting her through that. If she hadn’t learned to deal with the insecurity her butt would be out on the curb right now, and if she hadn’t learned to deal with the anger her butt would be paste in a duffel bag. 

“Fuck it.” She muttered. Then she climbed down a floor, and pulled the doors open. 

The second floor of the vault. She’d run her hand along the side on the ground floor, she knew how shallow it was, but it was the bottom half of it she actually wanted. The data was the real precious thing to protect. 

She- oh she remembered this place was guarded, wasn’t it? Oh, this place was guarded and someone as smart as Elba [i]absolutely[/i] warned them in advance about her, didn’t they? Fiona threw her head back and curled her fingers into claws and let out a silent scream of frustration that came out as a choked gurgle. A real scream now would have been the dumbest thing to get caught for. 

She quickly pulled her shirt off and threw it down the elevator shaft, quietly apologizing to Crystal for tossing the shirt she’d made like that, and threw her hair extensions after them, so she was shoulder-length again. She was hoping she could save that one for the getaway, so she didn’t need to dye it or something.

“Topless, but anonymous.” She muttered. “Kind of an improvement.” 

She knew the floorplan of this level, anyway. That much she could pull offline. She didn’t know how to access the vault, but she did know what was waiting for her. 

The stoop after the elevators was basically bare concrete corridor again. Far to her right, the fire escape. Through the solid steel doors in front of her, the vault. The smaller, thicker steel door to the right side was the security room, which looked out over the vault entrance area but didn’t give access to the vault itself. For that she’d need… To figure it out, her plan was to get this far and figure it out, except she assumed she’d still have her cover identity at this point. 

Which, okay, yeah she’d blown it, but hey! This was becoming a very valuable learning experience, and that was also important! 

She knocked on the security door. A shorter man answered, with a heavy gut and dense black curly hair like a scouring brush. Fiona vibed him as an ex-cop who was used to long stakeouts, Orochi was just the same work but better pay. 

Sponge-head immediately clocked the partial-nudity. “Uh?” 

“Someone hacked Ms Juarez cybernetics when the elevators got taken down, she’s bleeding pretty bad.” Fiona didn’t have to pretend she was exhausted at this point. 

“Shit, we heard about the elevators on the comms but-” Sponge-head’s eyes narrowed. “What happened to your blue shirt?” 

“My [i]white [/i]linen shirt is getting used as a bandage.” Fiona tilted her head and pretended that she was frustrated about her shirt, and not at being figured out. “So it’s probably my red shirt now.”

Sponge-head seemed to buy it. “Yeah, okay. Well, thanks for letting us know but it’s being handled.”

In her head, Fiona swore. She’d been hoping that’d get these guys to leave their post - through the crack in the door she could see that Sponge-head had a friend with him, so there were at least two guys down here. “Do you have a shirt I can borrow?” 

Which was how she got a security uniform passed to her from a locker. Score. 

[i]“Why’s she even wearing a bra?”[/i] she heard Sponge-head’s friend say from the back of the room behind the door as she buttoned the shirt up. [i]“She’s barely got tits.”[/i] Sponge-head’s face was a stone mask in the door as he pretended not to hear that.

In a way it was a very useful thing to hear. Until then, Fiona had only been considering non-violent solutions which had been [i]seriously[/i] limiting her options. “Thanks, guys,” she pretended she hadn’t heard it too. “You mind if I hang out here until the elevators work again?”

“Knock yourself out.” Sponge-head said. 

Okay. So she had a few minutes, tops. Her cover was blown, the head of security knew she planned to make for the server, and while Juarez comms implant was scrambled because the stupid dumbass idiot had shared vulnerabilities - there was nothing Fiona could do about someone finding her. 

She had only minutes to figure out how to open the vault, access the server, plug her macro in, make the transfers she wanted, and get back out of the building without getting caught by anyone who recognized her from before. Totally ad-hoc. 

She’d have to be pretty amazing to pull that one off. Just fucking incredible. She could not wait to see how she did it. 

Okay, what did she still have? She still had her cloned security credentials from Juarez, a guard uniform, a phone full of macros and the fire alarm. What could she do with that?

She checked her phone and pulled up her blueprint for the bank building. There was a guard room on the second floor that would give her access to the security terminals she needed for her showstopper trick, the one to clean the cameras. Did she have enough time to run up two flights of stairs and all the way back down? 

It beat standing around working out what to do.




“Hey, are, are you okay?” This guard looked Nubian, Fiona thought, mostly because she liked the word and how pretty it sounded. The guard was pretty. She was tall, dark and handsome, and very clearly concerned. 

Fiona held up a hand. “Elevators. Broken. Running. All over.” Two floors. “Need. To borrow. Terminal.” She was doubled over and still panting and looked like she was about to die and she felt like it. 

“Go for it.” The tall pretty guard let her go, and Fiona suspected it was half because Fiona had enough clearance to buzz herself in, and half because asking more questions right now felt cruel. Fiona would use some of her ill gotten gains to send this nice lady flowers and chocolates and sweet wines, she decided.

Fiona plugged her tether into her phone from one wrist again, and quietly plugged the tether into the security terminal with the other. The handsome lady guard had even been nice enough to leave it logged in for her, what a sweetheart. She would be getting so much crime wine. 

“Fuck…” Fiona muttered as she hit her macros. “Wasn’t fast enough.” 

“Wasn’t fast enough for what?”

“They’ve already wiped all of today’s footage.” Fiona said, before she turned and limped for her exit, wheezing. “I’ve got to go see if I can get the physical copies.” 

Hardware problems can cause software problems, software problems can cause hardware problems. The two are as inextricable as any other mind and body. 

Everywhere around the bank, the cameras had been sent contradictory signals to all their motors at once. A short would trip a breaker, but this slow grinding of the motors built up heat slower than that. They would grind hot enough that the camera frame would reach the flashpoint temperature for the volatile filmstock inside them, and burst into flames like kernels of popping popcorn. 

It took using the handrails as slides to be able to get back in time, Fiona had more ass than lungs to burn so she had made her choice and would live with it, but she was back at the vault level when it happened. 

She raised her phone to hit the fire alarm and-

Looked up. “Huh. Yeah, that makes sense.” 

Turned out starting a fire to create a plausible reason for the fire alarm going off? Might just set the fire alarm off. Wild. She’s kind of disappointed though. 

“Wanted to do it myself.” She pouted, then gave herself a disgusted look. “Why am I so annoyed about that? I cannot be power tripping that hard. The stairs should have humbled me.” 

“Stairs?” Sponge-head asked, and Fiona jumped because of course he’d be passing her on his way out. She hadn’t seen him come up while she’d been monologuing at the ceiling. 

“Nothing, just- I’ll be after you guys in a second, I just dropped my phone around here.” She smiled sweetly. 

“We’ll help you look, we’re not evacuating.” Sponge-head said, and sent the Tit-dick to look around the floor near the elevator for her. “There’s supposed to be someone coming down here.”

Yes. Her! To rob you. Go away! Fiona gave a serious frown. “Shit, I should probably get moving then. Sounds dangerous.” 

“Yeah, so-”

Fiona ran into the guard room and jammed a chair against the door, and then pushed over the locker she’d gotten her uniform from over the chair, and then she screamed. 

It was a gamble, a stupid idiot gamble, that the guards would try to break down her locked door before realizing they could run around to the other door on the vault side. Fortunately Sponge-head and Tit-dick reacted just how she hoped, going for the thing in front of them before working out alternatives. It gave her time to tether to the terminal and make her other solutions.

Okay, both guard doors would lock for anyone but her. The middle doors between rooms, the same. Could she open the vault door? 

Kind of, it was timelocked. 

Could she change the timelock time?

No.

… How did it know what time it was?

It checked the system time, which was verified by an external connection. 

If she cut the external connection lines, could it literally then be as simple as changing the terminal system clock to the time that the vault opened at?

Yes.

Wow, okay, she did that then. Another press, another physical line got cut, and now the computer had nobody to ask that it wasn’t actually 7pm. 

Fiona stared at the open vault door. “I refuse to believe you were actually the easiest part of today.” 

No, shit, right, she was working on a different completely fucked and broken clock. The server in the vault.

Fiona paused.

Her face fell into her hands.

Oh, she’d fucked up.

Oh, she’d massively, massively fucked up. 

“I cut the external connection.” She moaned. “Any change I make is just going to be local, isn’t it? Now they’re going to be able to just, roll everything back whether it’s suspicious or not. Fucking, idiot, stupid, moron-”

Also the two guards were still slamming the door and the rest were still coming and that was definitely, definitely her only path out of the building because she had stopped having a plan like fifteen minutes ago and had been blindly winging it since and now she was out of road. 

Well.

Maybe.

“Okay, so I can’t upload changes.” Fiona clawed her fingers down her cold, sweating face in frustration as she pushed through the guard room and stared at the server in the vault. “What can I [i]download[/i] that’s worth anything.”

Also incredibly stupid. Downloading meant taking physical evidence with her, which meant when she got caught (and she still had no escape route planned) she was definitely definitely definitely going to jail forever for it. 

But given the choice between going home red-handed or empty-handed, she had an obvious preference. 

She blinked as she remembered. “Oh. Duh. Thanks for the idea Elba. Genuinely would not have thought of it if you hadn’t been such an asshole.” Surprisingly easy once she thought of it, honestly. Most people don’t rob a bank for the server drivers and the operating system. Both easily fit on her nearly-empty burner phone. 

She laughed when she realized her way out, too. She skipped, skipped! Into the security room one last time, and unwound the tether from her left wrist. 

“Samantha!” Juarez’s boot slammed the jammed security door, hard enough the metal strained. Jesus Christ. “You bitch! There’s only one way out of there.” 

“My upload’s just going to take another minute.” Fiona sang. “You’re going to need a lot more than that to get me.” 

Another heavy boot, and the hinges of the door squeaked. She must have been using doorbreaker equipment, there was no way that was just kicking. “There’s only one way out of that room, girl, and it’s through me. And you’re not getting through me.” 

“Yeah, yeah, you’re going to kill me, whatever. Listen-” Fiona turned off all the weight sensors in the vents, and made a few of her own checks. Thanks for the tip, Ham-head, you were a good… friend? “I’m just warning you, I’ve got enough sentry turrets set up here to make that a problem for you. Lemme just do what I need to do, and then I’ll negotiate my surrender. Okay?” 

“You’re bluffing.” 

“Sure I am.” Fiona bluffed. “Check the cameras, r-slur.” 

The kicking stopped. “I need to talk to people about this. Don’t go anywhere. As if I needed to fucking tell you.” 

“Where would I even go?” Fiona snarked, just because she knew how much Juarez hated it. 

And then she ran for the air vent up, even though her lungs were more on fire than the cameras were at this point. Ham-head was right, it was a tight squeeze, but the rigid walls meant if she crushed her back to one side and kicked out with her legs to the other, she could shimmy and worm her way up to the ground floor. Eventually. Agonizingly. 

Ham-head had also been right that it was like a sauna the whole way up. She slipped twice because of the back sweat. By the time she pushed herself out of a ground floor grate, the urge to roll around in the cool puddles made by the fire sprinklers was overwhelming. She didn’t bother to resist it, she felt [i]toasted[/i]. 

She stood up and found herself behind the teller counters again. Most of the people had already left, leaving her without a crowd to hide in. They definitely would have told the cops, or the other security team, that she was using a uniform as a disguise by now. Fiona sighed as she tore [i]this[/i] shirt off too, it was basically so soaked through it was transparent anyway. She pulled her hair into a tight bun this time, as well. 

“Topless, but anonymous.” She muttered. “[i]Again[/i].” 

At least they still hadn’t worked out she’d cloned Juarez credentials, that worked to get her out of the employee-only area she’d crawled out of the vent into and back into the lobby. God, how embarrassing would that have been? She laughed until she realized that, no, she really didn’t have an answer for that one. 

She remembered Ham-head saying ‘Roach Motel’ and shuddered. 

Fiona ran through the empty reception and out of the bank, pushing her way past the police cordone. They weren’t even looking for her. Apparently they were getting ready for an armed standoff inside, so she hadn’t been as heartbreakingly slow shimmying up as she thought - either that or they thought she must be a really slow hacker, which, really? All that, and still no respect? 

Fiona looked back over her shoulder just once before heading home. With every step her smile got wider and wider, her laughter more and more manic, until she was doubled over, hacking and wheezing like the queen of the goblins, the goblin queen.

“I am!” She let cry to the heavens, “So fucking [i]good! [/i]I’m fucking [i]magic! [/i]Look upon my work, ye mighty, and-” 

Ah. Right. Do not maniacally laugh and scream about your power in public until after you buy a new shirt for the train home, Fiona, you dumb stupid powerful wizard idiot. 

What she had stolen wasn’t as easy to get money from as making direct changes would have been, but nothing about today was as easy as it should have been. She’d still have to comb through what she had to be able to find an exploit that she could use that would actually do what she want. She had a few ideas though, especially if she could use this to crack their password encryptions. Downloading usernames and passwords only lasts a reset, but a cracked encryption is forever.  

She wasn’t worried about that part, it was literally the easiest part of robbing a bank.
[/hider]


[hider=Passenger 57 by Junta Thompson]

They made a movie in 1992 called Passenger 57, starring two men named Wesley Snipes and Bruce Payne. I think that really was their actual names. I love watching old movies like this as a kind of window into a world that doesn’t exist anymore, you learn how much is lost in translation when time is a distance. The past is a foreign country. 

There was one scene in Passenger 57 that best explains what I mean. There’s a hostage situation on a plane, but the hostage has her seatbelt on. So Wesley Snipes shoots a hole in the window behind the hostage taker to cause explosive decompression and get this guy sucked out of a plane. I wondered if people really believed that was how it worked. Most people my age have never seen an airplane, so I don’t have a frame of reference for what people got wrong about them.

The second thing that stuck with me was just how many people seemed to have guns. 

How many times do people use firearms on Aevum? I found we actually have something close to a real answer number, and not once has it caused us all to be ripped out of a hole into space. 

We can guess that about 150,000 rounds of ammunition discharged on Aevum every year. That’s one round per forty thousand people that we know about, and honestly that still sounded high to me. Around 90,000 are police discharges, 30,000 are criminal discharges, 10,000 are criminal discharges specifically against the police, and 10,000 remaining are registered by security services. 

We can get numbers this low because the regulation of the manufacturing and sale of ammunition on the station has been far more effective than the prohibition of guns. It’s fairly easy to make or print a gun with fairly off-the-shelf pieces, but [i]bullets[/i] with their volatile elements are a much bigger pain in the ass to bootleg. The scale that it becomes pragmatic is also the scale an illegal operation becomes effective to target and shut down, and for estimates to be made of their production total. 

This didn’t used to be true. Wesley Snipes would have had to register his gun, which was seen as the complicated thing to engineer, but have found it trivial to buy boxes of bullets for his registered firearm. He also lived in a world which required border enforcement - Mexico had only a single legal gunshop when Mr Snipes made this movie, but Mexico was just flooded with America’s smuggled firearms. Aevum has no inconvenient neighbours. Now even legitimate security services have to log all their discharges, and find it hard to replace their ammo stocks when they can’t register [i]exactly[/i] what happened to their previous stock. The bullets used in unaccounted for firings aren’t replaced until the company can claim them as expired, which could be up to ten years. 

That brings out something that would otherwise be hidden by only looking at discharge numbers alone. While a quarter of all criminal discharges are used against the police, this doesn’t reflect a quarter of all incidents of criminal discharges. Shots taken against police tend to be protracted shootouts which use a lot of bullets from both sides. The majority of criminal discharges are radically lower in count: A single warning shot fired in the air during a robbery, a bullet to the back of the head for an execution, fired point-blank range from the sidelines of a knife or sword fight. 

Historically, it looks like as the disappearance of firearms is taken more and more for granted, far fewer bullets are fired. Half just seems to be because the bullets are what have become so expensive and difficult to obtain. Some of it just seems that as the murder rate remains around  1 per 100,000 as other weapons fill that space, guns aren’t how most people expect to die due to violence. The use of a firearm becomes more associated with either ambush or simply shots taken from a position of absolute advantage. 

There’s another thing about these old movies, you notice, is that the guns themselves have a coded language to them. Someone with an AK-47 is always a criminal or a communist, someone with an FN-FAL is always a colonialist or a mercenary, and everyone with a shotgun is your favourite character in the movie. So I asked myself, what’s the cinematic language of the guns now, in 2080?

Now, I think it’s just what owning a gun says, more than whatever gun is being used. It says you’re either part of the state’s increasingly effective monopoly of violence, or that you already had to be someone incredibly dangerous to have the weapon at all. It’s an expensive status symbol for someone not to be fucked with. 

You know what else sucks about all these old action movies, though? Because everyone has guns, you don’t really see sword fights in the Western canon outside of fantasy and period pieces. It’s so hard to find a good [i]urban[/i] swordfighting scene.

If you want to see one, personally, I recommend 1998’s Blade starring Wesley Snipes. 
[/hider]