7 Into The Vents

Now all set I got into the vents closing it back behind me and I started to head for the Black room quietly. it was quite easy to make my way through the vents because before I made the jump back i had studied the original blueprints for the building. The original one which had not been altered removing the Black room from it.

From the blueprints the Black room was on the sub level and the only way to get there was through the elevator and without a high-level ID card my chances of making it there was less than zero.

My only option was to remove the Identification confirmation process entirely and to do that i needed to gain direct physical access to the server or any port terminals in connection with it and lucky for me there was a port on the fourth floor which was also the security floor used to make alterations to the codes instead of going to the main server room which funny enough was also in the sublevels.

The security floor was strategically placed at the middle of the entire building so if there was trouble on any of the other floors the security officers would be of equal distance away from it which also ensured faster average response time.

From the vents I had to go vertically downward to get to a lower floor which was hard because of my weak hands and the dust on the surface of the vent reduced my grip in some places but somehow I managed to make it there.

Now positioned horizontally and directly above the port which was on the wall of the fourth floor I took off the air vent lid.

I wanted to jump down then make changes to the port's control panel but I was closer to it from the vent than from the floor so the only choice was to make the changes from there and the only way was to do it upside down using my leg to keep myself in place in the vents while my upper body was dangling outside.

I opened it up removing the cover of the port but my grip was not properly placed on the cover because of being upside-down and all and the blood rushing to my head made me dizzy. The cover fell to the ground but luckily a plastic cord connecting the cover to the body of the port totally prevented the fall.

"I can't believe I was just saved by ordinary plastic... Damn!" I said looking at the place the port cover would have landed on if it wasn't stopped mid fall

After that little scare I raised my body up to allow the blood to flow back down and regain my balance and my breath.

I went back again and carried on with the disconnecting and rewiring of the scanning AI with the paperclips and calender binding cord making it to function as a normal elevator.

After that I messed with the camera's databox in the port as well. I couldn't let anyone see me sneaking around so I put all the cameras on a five minute loop and as for how I did that, there were two databoxes in the port that connected with the camera feed and what the monitor displays. The primary databox was directly connected to the camera feed line while the secondary databox was connected to the primary

The footage that the cameras captured entered the primary databox for processing, quality control check and sometimes facial identification which takes like a nano second to do.

After all that processing the feed gets sent simultaneously to a storage board and also to the secondary databox which does some finishing touches and wirelessly sends the feed to the monitors and that's what the security personnel in the monitor room sees.

The storage board was for in case they needed to see something that had already happened so they could reverse the feed to a limited time range. The storage board had what you woild call cells that could store up to thirty minutes of data each and there were six of them and after every three hours the cumulative feed data gets sent to the cloud and then cleared out.

The reason there were six thirty minutes cells and instead of one three hours cell was because of as ironic as it sounds security. If one cell gets damaged then there would still be five left to pick up the pace of the damaged one plus there would still be the memory of the other five in case it was a serious issue but if there was only one three hours cell then if damaged all the recorded feed would have been lost plus they would have to change it immediately which also took time, time during which they would be blind

Four cells were already filled so what I did was to connect those cells of the storage board to the secondary databox and disconnect the primary from it. This made the feed that was being sent to the monitors to be the recorded ones from the cell and no longer the live footage being caught on camera.

Since the live footage was still filling the remaining two cells then once they filled up all the cell data would get deleted and the new feed that will enter the monitors would be live footage again straight from the cells so I only had less than an hour to get things done.

After connecting everything all that was left was to do the switch of monitor feed source but I needed to be lightening fast about it because the longer the time I took the longer the time of no feed entering the monitor would be and I was sure that someone was in thesame floor with me watching those feed.

I needed to switch it at the right moment, just short enough that if seen would be put up as a glitch but also long enough that even if what was on the feed before the glitch and what was after the glitch were different the human mind would scope it under the possibility of the change happening during the brief glitch period

Five seconds seemed like the ideal time so I pulled out the last cord and made the final connection and the the feed came back on but while I did it I didn't hear any complain from the monitor room which was just few meters away from me

"looks like no one was paying attention to the monitors"

I stretched my entire body from the top of the vent and almost fell down but I braced myself and held on to the corner of the vent opening and I got a hold of the port cover.

With that in hand I closed back the port then I reached into the vent and grabbed my backpack next to my leg and threw it down then I jumped down as well.

From the fourth floor I snuck into the elevator which was funny how the security floor had the weakest amount of security consciousness in the entire building

From the elevator I went down for the sub levels

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SEVERAL MINUTES LATER

I had my heartbeat racing and palms sweaty as I stared into the display as it counted 70%, 80%, 90%...99%,...

If this didn't work then not only will my plans fail but the security would get alerted and I might get caught.