As the operative team C moved through the outskirts of the city, the holographic sign of a nearby bar flickered, cut, and then, reappeared with a different image — one of their target standing proudly and smirking at them with her arms folded. The moment they encountered it, it was promptly shot up, before they realized what it was — and before another sign in the same intersection flickered and cut, putting her smug face on a high-up billboard.
In just a few moments, it was everything. Traffic lights, TV screens, holo-projectors, signs, advertisements...every single digital screen in that intersection was replaced with a different image of her face, in a different pose, the only constant being that they all had the same shit-eating grin.
"Oh, you kn█w. Just st█nding aroun█ smiling like a dork."Deeper in the city, the move would have been an even better distraction, though that would outstretch the number of devices she could affect at a time. A city intersection was filled with dozens, maybe hundreds civilian devices that could be taken over one by one with enough advance preparation. That interstice of streets were chaos without guidance, cars honking, people shouting, and the operatives were frozen, not sure just what kind of trap they were walking into.
It was a psychological one, more than anything else. They were primed to look for her face, picking it out among a number of images that were not her. But plaster it everywhere, and suddenly that classification became troublesome.
Her camo-suit was damaged. It was bulletproof as long as it didn't have water in it, and waterproof as long as it didn't have bullets in it, but it turned out that both at once was a bit much for it to handle. At most, it could change her image to one of the same shape, but with a rapidly shifting, prismatic outline...
...in other words, just like a malfunctioning hologram. The infrared displacement was still functional, so even with their goggles, they ended up not being able to tell the difference. They ran right past her.
"L█st 'em. You can hear their radi█ ch█tter too, right?" The voice came across,
"I lowered the encryption lev██ a bit, so that this signal sh██ld mix in better with th█ ambient ones. Stealth ██ better than strength at this point, █ ██████"A strongly encrypted signal couldn't be read if it was intercepted, but the endpoints could still be picked out. And even if they couldn't tell exactly what was being said, a signal with that level of encryption, with an endpoint at a riverside location, was a dead giveaway. Lower the security to be the same as every other signal flying around the city, though, and there was no way to pick it out. Even if they cracked every transmission and listened to them all at once, they would just get a cacophony.
"I'm back ██ the river, same drawbridge as before. Scene █f the crime~ He he he~" Returning to a location where they had already found her, in order to escape, was one of those things that was either a crazy idea or a crazy-brilliant one, depending on context. The girl had trouble reading context sometimes, but she loved crazy, and it was crazy either way, so why not?
"As for who I am, y█u can call me SIGINT. I don't give o██ my real name." At some point, she had started using her internet handle as her identifier in the real world. When had that been...?
"As for whether ██ █ot you can trust me, wel█, you can't, sorry not sorry. But, you already m█de the decision to side with me, didn't you? ███ could have shot me just as easily, back ther██" That precocious smile of hers damn near came across the static.
"I'm interested ██ hearing your reasons, too. People like yo█ don't see a situation like that and go, 'oh no, that po█r person is in trouble, I must save them!'"Even though she said that, she was still entering a situation where only her 'guardian angel' would have any leverage. There was only one reason that a gunman would want to meet her in person, when they could talk just as easily over the radio - that reason was, as always, guns. SIGINT carried no weapons and was useless in a firefight, as the other person no doubt knew at this point. Even though she was strolling up as confident as ever in form, in terms of function, she might as well be laying herself at the woman's feet.
But, even in a situation like this, she still had a back-up plan. The drawbridge location hadn't been as randomly selected as her crazed demeanor would have someone believe. She had already hacked into the waterway control system, and could raise the bridge at any time with just a thought. As long as they stood on opposite halves of it, she'd have an easy escape, and she knew which side the interloper was arriving from.
"Nice job with ███ fire alarm, by the way. That one██ █ classic, I love it."
Drenched, glasses tilted, and with a giant hole punched in her 'bulletproof' suit, SIGINT looked like she had just stepped off of a roller coaster as she leaned back against the same side of the bridge that she'd taken her tumble from a few minutes before. The gunman had already shown her that she had access to this general area, as evidenced by the bodies that were still around somewhere.
...Why
would someone save a person like her? The question burned in her mind. She hadn't exactly gone out of her way to get on anyone's good side. Ingratiation wasn't in her playbook. But if what they wanted was value out of her, well, the bounty had been right there all this time up until now. Someone she didn't know, but someone with a vested interest in keeping her alive, that wasn't tied to money...
She was grinning widely before she even realized it. The girl's mind was like a dog, chasing cars and chewing on bones whenever it could. And it was fun. Fun to
wonder, fun to
think, fun to
plot, to
unplot. Fun to tie apart the tangled threads, bit by bit, like a jigsaw puzzle.
Common sense dictated that someone with a bounty like hers should have just ignored the person completely, taking advantage of the situation to escape both of them. But instead, she leaned on the railing with a relaxed pose, risking her life in exchange for one simple thing...
...to
know.
1x Thank
