Cyberspace pulsated with its own cybernetic life. Staring at the visualization of complex software streaming data through a massive network had the same hypnotizing power as staring at the stream of flying cars moving so smoothly through air corridors, up high in the clouds pierced by megatowers, endpoints sending and receiving packets like neons glittering from the walls, their content like holograms floating above suspended plazas. Easily accessible information like top levels receiving sunlight during the day and then extensive metadata, hidden behing ICE blockades like lower levels where the poor coexisted, with no sunlight and no hope. It was a great philosophical question whether cyberspace had been modeled after cities to provide users with some familiarity and ease their navigation learning processes or whether it existed simply as it'd always been bound to exist by the laws of computing and it was humans who came closer and closer to merge meat- and cyberspace into one coherent plane of existence as technology developed and flesh fused with machine.

"Enough is enough" thought Isidor Martinex as he returned to methodically assembling first Trappis 1 cyberspace-compatible icebreaker that was to be released in an absence of quarantine protocols and help gain a foothold around Freezing Point. Datamining in Node Prime was a hopeless operation, but studying the changes made to infromation stored there helped prepare a set of basic responses and protocols for dealing with other entities attempting to read or modify it. For starters, netrunners needed something capable of breaking quarantine before the demonic entities could dissolve the intruder program into meaningless datachunk. Something powerful enough and survivable for long enough. Padding the main code with some obfuscation and "decoy instructions" should help instances of the new program withstand a direct countermeasure action without getting overloaded like it happened to Overloaders, but without any solid information about local security preparing actual counter-countermeasures was doomed to fail. And so at its core the attack program was just a payload of corrupt, crash-inducing operations wrapped around with random nonsense scrapped from Node Prime. Designated "Icebreaker Prime" - an obvious and not fancy at all name for an obvious and not fancy at all approach - this cybernetic weapon was supposed to be spawned initially in 5 instances with the possibility to scale if too many quarantine instances would show up at the same time, tasked with watching over the closest vicinity of Node Prime, but being potentially capable of intervening within the whole domain of Freezing Point.

Icebreaker Prime class Assault Program      15 000 MB       458 Threads       2 818,8 BP       TCS 300    TH 2 400    EM 0
8000 GB/s      ICE res 10-54       ICE Shields 0-0       HTK 83      Sensors 0/0/0/0      DCR 26      PPV 60
Maint Life 3,07 macroticks     MSP 1 879    AFR 112%    IFR 1,6%    1YR 300    5YR 4 502    Max Reconfig 600 MSP
Netrunner Virtual Assistant    Control Rating 1   BRG   
Intended Deployment Time: 2 ticks Integrity Check Required   

Cyberspace Gliding Protocol  EP1200,00 (2)    Power 2400    CPU Use 180,74%    Cybernetic Signature 1200    Critical Fault 20%
Cache Capacity 1 081 000 MB    Range 7,2 billion micronodes (10 microticks at full power)

20 C2,5 Focused ICE Destroyer (10)    Range 256 000micronodes     TS: 8 000 GB/s     Power 10-2,5     RM 40 000 km    ROF 20       
Dataflow Control R256-TS8100 (1)     Max Range: 256 000 micronodes   TS: 8 100 GB/s     96 92 88 84 80 77 73 69 65 61
Stream health monitoring subsystem R25 (1)     Total Data Output 25,3 GB   Critical Fault 5%

Hostile Construct Identification Sensor AS84-R100 (1)     GPS 21000     Range 84,9m micronodes    Resolution 100

ECCM-1 (1)         This design is classed as a Simple Program for integrity maintenance purposes
This design is classed as an ICE Punctuator for autonomous running purposes

With first meaningful, autonomous Icebreakers assembled it became possible to look into exploring data on Freezing Point I and analyze logs from the cluster in between the former and Node Prime to gain insights into the authentication systems. Problem was, everything leaves virtual trace. Cybernetic footpring of Icebreakers was there, glowing like a huge neon for all countermeasures, drawing them towards Node Prime like synthetic blood would attract android sharks displayed in one of Synthcity's zoos. And instances of Icebreaker Prime didn't even attempt to hide their presence. But oddly enough, shortly after their launch only a single instance of Quarantine ICE appeared. And it looked weak in comparsion, gliding twice as slow as what Isidor wielded. Not having any sophisticated AIs for automatically resolving combat for him and not trusting the unknown environment, PURGE member had set up his software to only notify him upon enemy detection and then give him full control for the counter-counter attack run. The main flaw of Quarantine was its signature being also bright as nighttime Neo Tokyo and severely impacting the flow of data around since it was essentially a tight firewall, marking it as easy target. Icebreaker Prime had no trouble following the origin of this disturbance, ready to crash it.



Miliseconds passed, simulating countless ticks. Icebreakers were gliding towards the lone Quarantine block, hopelessly attempting to cut off all communication from Node Prime, preparing to strike. To much surprise, before Isidor could notice what was going on despite his next-gen brain amplifying chip, patterns of Quarantine signature shifted in a barely noticeable way. A few bits exchanged between the actual location of the ICE and its surrounding firewall, temporarily sending Icebreakers off tracks. As they scanned virtual void, Quarantine launched its cleanup protocols and damaged the inegrity of one instance.



The core functionality still executed and brief checksum validation confirmed the payload remained secure and prepared. Construct Identification Sensors did their job and pinpointed the origin of counterintrusion. It was time to retaliate. Sparks of excitement got simulated for Isidor's brain as Icebreakers overwhelmed Quarantine ICE with large portions of corrupt or invalid inputs it had to process. When its threads cracked under pressure, identification sensors of Icebreakers had no trouble decompiling and scanning Quarantine's source and identifying a shutdown sequence. One simple request later the hostile ICE vanished., leaving only some logs of stopping correctly. And obviously more suspicious traces of cybernetic combats from a few ticks before.



That was one small step for a netrunner, bug a giant step for Trappist-1 Run. Isidor managed to copy and isolate most of Quarantine ICE source code. He realized it wasn't meant to fight off serious incursion in the first place. It was designed to just stall the opponent for as long as possible (and completely defeat wannabe hackers constituting for 90% of all security incidents), at the same time notifying proper response systems. In the light of new information, tight lockdown followed by a moment of silence started to look more coherent. Quarantine demons isolated the problem, gathered some info about it, neutralized its attempts to push through and delegated the issue to properly outfitted ICE, whatever that might be. Quarantine wasn't a problem anymore. A real battle was coming. Still, PURGE operatives had a couple of ticks of less intense activity around their turf. The priority, aside from a general one of amassing and processing as much data as quickly as possible, has been decided to focus on the cluster of small nodes near the center of Freezing Point. Wilford Vanterpool, the best data scientist among the team, was supposed to come up with a solution to anaylze the cluster without exposing the operation too much beyond what had already been exposed.

His response was a spiritual successor to Sand Crawler, a program capable of not only indexing, but downloading, storing and filtering the information for anything usable. Due to time and resource constraints, again no sophisticated AI assistant had been used, with Wilford trusting his ability to forumlate queries manually and verifying the results.

Dataminer class Datamining Platform      100 000 MB       700 Threads       2 518,6 BP       TCS 2 000    TH 2 000    EM 0
1000 GB/s      ICE res 1-191       ICE Shields 0-0       HTK 143      Sensors 0/0/0/0      DCR 1      PPV 0
MSP 15    Max Reconfig 120 MSP
Storage 25 000 GB    I/O Buffer 2 GB   
Netrunner    Control Rating 1   BRG   
Intended Deployment Time: 12 ticks    Integrity Check Required       
Dataminer: 11 modules processing 176 GB per microtick

Cyberspace Gliding Protocol  EP400,0 (5)    Power 2000    CPU Use 4,74%    Cybernetic Signature 400    Critical Fault 5%
Cache Capacity 4 095 000 MB    Range 155,4 billion micronodes (1798 microticks at full power)

This design is classed as a Non-offensive Program for integrity maintenance purposes
This design is classed as a Dataminer for autonomous running purposes

At first two instances had been spawned, but depending on (lack of) hostile response more could always follow. One had obviously been sent to explore the cluster, meanwhile other glided closer to the ICE barriers encapsulating Freezing Point to scan more uncharted territory. In the meantime most of the team stayed on Node Prime, busy improving the design of corruption payload delivery protocols as well as the robustness and profile of the payload itself. The most notable idea was to, instead of building a cybernetic weapon from scratch and using it to deal damage, repurpose bits of quatantine code to manipulate nearby datastreams, materializing and dissolving weapons out of enemy's surroundings at a whim. If solid enough, such design could in theory bypass most, if not all, counter-countermeasures (at least for a short while before the trick gets ultimately detected and the defending program absorbs it and learns based on it), since the weapon would be not an alien construct, but a creation based on already authorized routines. At first ticks the target wouldn't even register something attacking it, let alone muster up some defences. The most difficult part of this plan was presumably altering data to make it dangerous enough, but at the same time similar enough to let it slide past error detections. Or rather not slide, but get classified as a minor warning that's safe to ignore when facing an actual intruder.

Simulatneously Paul Urrea started setting up listeners on Node Prime to build up the capability of broad monitoring any movement within Freezing Point. Besides having a general notification system, main concern was about second Dataminer heading to less known territory. Without being launched soon enough, Icebreakers would have a hard time catching up to it in time, but keeping the programs active all the time created needless strain on resources and generated stronger cybernetic signature. He almost panicked when, long before covering the intended space, first listener blinked instantly upon deployment, displaying hostile signatures right at Node Prime. Quarantine ICE was a bit more complex at the end of the day, because it must'd left a worm right in the center of PURGE operations without the worm itself or the act of plugging being detected. Visualization software generated its image as a solid, grey, perfectly-shaped cube, buried deep within the node structure, but fitting so perfectly it looked like it was just its native part that, if removed, would make it cease working. In first reaction Paul reached for Icebreakers and unleashed their payloads at the entity. They were able to do damage, but it was barely of any significance. Most puzzling was the damage pattern displayed on visualization, though. With each scored hit the cube lost a smaller, also perfectly-shaped, cube cut directly out of the edge of the worm. Quick glance at generated logs confirmed the program was prepared for such trivial attempts and while it couldn't last indefinitely, it had complex algorithms to keep it almost fully operational and control the loss of data and instructions to prevent significant functional disruptions until most of the construct would be stripped away.



There was no harm in waiting for Icebreakers to finish the cleanup, except it didn't take long to notice their blasts were corrupting more of a healthy node structure than the actual virus. Eventually it'd be destroyed, but there wouldn't be much of a node left to continue serving as a base of operations. Some netrunners threw some crappy, but precisely targeted scripts at it in a hassle and suceeded in cutting out more cubes, but that too was a waste of time when dozens of spawned instances ceased to exist two microticks after launching the attack. As unfortunate as it looked like, PURGE had to move on with a mysterious Pandora Box of some sort right at the virtual doorstep with no easy ways to get rid of it or learn its purpose and operation methods, preferably all of it at the same time. Ticks passed, but besides defending itself the worm didn't attempt to disrupt the run. Maybe it just couldn't. Problem was, it might as well be capable of monitoring activity within Node Prime and send the logs somewhere to something, in particular early conceptual sketches of materializing weapons out of chunks already authorized by the targets it was meant to be used against. Due to the concept being too promising and time and resources needed for proper implementation non-existent, it was decided that the best course of action would be to just stop working on it alltogether until the worm exists no more, focusing mostly on datamining and expanding - info about performing these types of actions in the processors of enemy was mostly harmless.

Plug in

The technology behind might have been roughly the same, but the implementation might have been not. PURGE netrunners floated in cyberspace, wondering whether it'd be faster to rewrite their programs from scratch to match required protocols or it'd pay off to keep them as they were, only creating some wrappers to adapt them to existing standards and run them via these. The initial enthusiasm slowly weared off not only because of this basic dilemma, but mostly because of the amount of corrupted nodes. Upon plugging in, they tried cluster after cluster to reach one that wouldn't ask them for authorization, just to start slowly and easily adapt to the new environment, but when they found out one, most of the data they came across was severely damaged beyond any sane recovery. Maybe that's why nothing asked for authorization, too - the firewall of that cluster might as well be irrevokably corrupted like everything else. But maybe it was for the greater good - less focus on data mining for the start, more on learning to safely navigate this particular network.

A quick glance around cluster's endpoints revealed rest of the cybersecurity was in much better shape - there was no branching out to the neighbours for as long as the thick ice surrounding this region hadn't been melted. On the other hand, such complex layers of isolation meant nothing was likely to take too much interest in the netrunners' little virtual outpost for the time being. It created an interesting opportunity of setting up a sandbox environment just to develop and test things out before the proper run. Netrunners nicknamed this pretend-it's-completely-safe haven Freezing Point - located on the border between unrestricted access and mean unintelligible ICE blockades.

Corrupted data, programs and constructs had the prime advantage of being easily removeable without triggering any defensive response from the system. Lots of incomprehensible resources meant lots of potential storage space and computing power. The first logical thing to do was to just clean up some node and settle there. Too afraid to run not tested software, netrunners had to manually review and confirm each data piece to be cleansed, but better safe than sorry. Their suspended biological bodies probably only experienced a few seconds of increased brain activity so far, but for them it felt like hours of menial labour. Everyone sighed with a relief once the space had been carved out from the hostile domain, allowing for the first test script runs and practices.

On the bits of Node Prime a first program had been developed. Made from scratch, a simple cyberspace crawler that should search the cluster around, scouting for potential dangers and opportunities. Too weak to download or safely remove the data on its own, but capable of indexing them for making future node cleanup faster and easier just fine. Not too fast, naked and afraid in front of whatever security construct demanding identification and not really capable of anything significant, but it had to do. Designated as Sand Crawler due to the fact it was supposed to crawl through a zone temporairly considered a sandbox area, it was ready to go.

Sand Crawler class Survey Program      5 000 MB       126 Threads       1 452,9 BP       TCS 100    TH 200    EM 0
2000 GB/s      ICE Res 1-26       ICE Shields 0-0       HTK 29      Sensors 0/0/0/16      DCR 5      PPV 0
Maint Life 7,03 macroticks     MSP 908    AFR 40%    IFR 0,6%    1YR 32    5YR 482    Max Reconfig 150 MSP
Netrunner    Control Rating 1   BRG   
Intended Deployment Time: 60 ticks    Integrity Check Required   

Cyberspace Gliding Protocol  EP200,00 (1)    Power 200,0    CPU Use 6,92%    Cybernetic Signature 200,00    Critical Fault 5%
Cache Capacity 279 000 MB    Range 145,2 billion micronodes (840 microticks at full power)

Improved Cyberspace Sensors ( 8 )   16 Survey Points Per Tick

This design is classed as an Offensive Program for integrity maintenance purposes
This design is classed as a Survey Crawler for autonomous running purposes

Most data it scanned were heaps of junk, but sometimes it'd score something decipherable. While nothing was of any importance, it helped establish the ways of dataflow inside this cyberspace. It wasn't important that user with id 123490811231237182375 requested access to own simulation session from 14th March 2065 with id 2304912039120341234134, but it mattered that the data sent by this user to confirm ownership of the requested recordings appeared in a slightly modified form in three different places within the following five microticks. It seemed that all authorization data must'd come through the collection of smaller nodes in the center, where it'd change form via seemingly random patterns and then each node would propagate it further to more secure places, but this portion of the system remained inactive during confirmation feedback reaching back for the user. That meant that potentially all that mattered was catching and reprocessing the response early enough, not necessairly overriding whatever myserious rituals happened in the collection.



Some runners remained monitoring Sand Crawler's relatively peaceful journey, but most dug themselves in Node Prime, focusing on increasing accessible computing power and data processing capacity, preparing to start initiating transfers consolidating filtered information in the node, allowing for easy browsing and cataloguing for future reference. And write some proper icebreakers. Or wrap compatible protocols around existing ones, because the debate was far from being settled. Quite the opposite, in fact, as yet another idea emerged. Trappist 1's cyberspace was the exact opposite of its meatspace - the later was dead, still and eerily silent, but the former was bustling with life like Neo Tokyo during the night, with each little packet like a flying car travelling between the city's many levels. These packets were small and lightweight - in theory it should be possible to somehow shuffle them around, override the order - turning a fine dataset into disorganised mess, flooding the system's defences with cleanup tasks, decreasing its capability to respond to a well-organized opponent. This idea gained the least popularity, though, because it assumed less quiet approach right from the start - and the heat might be enough to not only burn the ice, but also netrunners' brains once the system figures out the real adversary and root cause of the sudden problems.

The most interesting node catalogued by Sand Crawler was Freezing Point I. It looked like some sort of supervisor for the collection of smaller nodes encrypting authorization messages, floating around it. If it could be overwritten, then all the previous approaches would end up obsolete - seizing control of this supervisor would mean to seize control of this cluster's side of ensuring the clearance level of users attempting to reach other clusters and branches from it. Its location remained more problematic than the difficulty of accomplishing such task in itself, though - Freezing Point I was the closest node to the cluster's center and was bound to be directly linked with it. No tampering with one without triggering the other. But at the very least two things could be tried: reading some logs off it and transfering sample additional data separately, without touching the existing content. Of course a defensive response might still be triggered, but that way it'd only be treated as a node attack, not entire cluster attack.

Preparations for that little experiment went full speed ahead. With little in terms of time and resources such safety precautions like watcher constructs for autonomous datastream anomaly detection had been omitted until completion of the more pending task. That's why it took so much longer for PURGE members to spot a particular group of packets circling around the nodes of Freezing Point, like predators around prey. Node Prime had already been generating quite some not properly concealed traffic and heat and mentioned group was drawn to it like animals to blood. Before anyone could react, one of the packets picked up superluminal speed (or so was the impression for the observer), only to disappear somewhere in a maze of glowing corridors and never return. Its place had been taken up by something of a more meanicng size and posture - a whole construct, though of unintelligible shape and size. It had the posture of a glitched program, faaling apart in front of a netrunner's virtual eyes. But it floated around for too long to be regarded as such, its shapeless shape but a disguise. It kept on waiting, its patience depleting somewhere along the lines of quantum algorithms.



"Well smeg" was the most sophisticated thought anyone could form for a while. But then an idea dawned upon everybody: the shape might as well not be a decoy mechanism of some sort: if PURGE team was incompatible with Trappist 1 cyberspace, then so cyberspace must've been incompatible with the team, too, the ICE in front of them stuck on trying to communicate with intruders not appearing as intruders on its radars, but also as a shapeless shape. Unless of course it wasn't going to just, unable to tailor a better response, initiate purge sequence on this whole area, better safer than sorry. That'd end up as pretty ironic way for the runners to be defeated. Either way, the cloak of incompatibility couldn't last too long - with every move of any netrunner, the construct was reshaping itself. Listening. Observing. Learning. Adjusting. Customizing. Ticks were ticking and this must've been some damn solid ice to be able to reconfigure on the fly down to such deep level. But as it redefnied its form, it also inevitably exposed itself. Not voluntairly and not directly, but it did. Every movement it made could be traced to the corresponding movement of one of the netrunners, forming more dense array of mapped patterns as the process continued. For every own movement netrunners could see how it was being processed, and thus what the real form of the entity must be like for it process it the way it did and not the other. Slowly, but steadily, a true face of the construct could be uncovered from layers of deception and obfuscation. And it didn't have a face of a raw program: more like a human construct. Or humanoid android. Or human-emulating AI, only slightly twisted from the usual human form to appear more terrifying in the domain of customizable avatars. A mix of a soldier wearing power armor and a demon. Nevertheless, if it could be revealed, it could be understood. And if it could be understood, it could be fought.